The Lifespan of A Day

The Lifespan of a Day

Wake up.

What’s the first thing that you think of?

You proceed to go throughout your day as normal. Everything as expected. Brush your teeth, go to class, head to work. Eat at 12pm, dinner at 5pm. Rinse and repeat. What happened?

You think to yourself: when did life become so monotonous, reducing your once active lifestyle to now following an hour by hour filled google calendar leaving no room for anything or anyone else?  Maybe it was society trying to fit you into a conceptualized boxed definition of something that you are not. Or was it constantly being interviewed by others pushing you towards and perpetuating a narrative that you one day hope to achieve. Whatever it maybe, it doesn’t matter as to how. All you feel is this mundane shadow creeping up, taking your place creating a shell of what you used to be, giving off an impression that everything is okay.

There often comes a time in many individuals lives where they face this cycle of repetition and struggle. It implicates a sort of isolation — from themselves, from their work and from others. They lose sight of who they are and what they want to be. They easily undermine their own healthy and happiness in pursuit of validation in work. A cognitive dissonance takes its place within them of complacency and comfort with the unsettlement of achieving unreached potential and wanting more.

So often, so many individuals around us face this disconnect. We may even face this detachment ourselves. We go through these days where we forget how we got to where we’re at. All the hard work in resume workshopping and cover letter writing to get to the job that you were excited to hear the callback from, the same job that you strain over getting ready for in the morning. The stress that culminates over the night before the midterm for a class you were hoping to phase one three months back. The activity that you once considered as your passion, now a performance that needs to be met with perfection. The stress and the expectations that creates it are normalized. We allow this to cloud what we once were before, to define us. It makes us lose sight of what was to come ahead.

It’s near the end of the day. A day so systemized that everything goes as expected to schedule. But at its resolution, a divergence of thought occurs internally. One path takes all the emotions of the day and you succumb. Tired and drained from all that comes before, taking a toll, searching for one thing — an escape. The other path continues. A revitalized energy emerges —  the realization of all the impact that you made throughout your actions of the day, of how you grew as a person, of being able to chase your dreams. On this path, you become filled with excitement, the fervor of possibility, the wonders of betterment.

Which path do you take at the end of the day?

Then before you know it, it’s tomorrow. 

Author’s note: This is my first time writing one of these articles. For me, I struggled with trying to find a topic that I wanted to best represent me. Instead, I wanted to write about something that I see so many people around me: dealing with the monotony of life and losing sight of all their passions and who they want. I’m not sure if it’s depression or if it’s demotivation, but there are those days where there are no excitement, no vigor. During these moments, I believe it's best to take a step back to re-evaluate how you got to that position and how you can proceed forward with a strong conviction. As difficult as it is, with time, there is always tomorrow.