The Incredible Power of One Day at a Time

For years I’ve known that living one day at a time is a simple, almost magical spiritual tool for solving just about all of life’s problems.  Almost all problems happen mostly on the thinking-feeling level:  Even if you’ve lost your job and are going to run out of money next week, even if you have a debilitating illness that’s going to get worse and worse, even if you’re going to die tomorrow, the real problem is how you feel about that today – it’s the fear, the dread, the projecting, the imagining, the things you tell yourself about how bad it’s going to be.  And almost always, when you ask yourself, Am I okay right now? the answer is yes.   Even when the worst thing that could happen is happening right here in this moment, there’s usually some part of it that’s not as bad as you thought it would be and/or there are usually things you can do to make it better.

That’s why living one day at a time solves almost all of life’s problems: because there are no real problems in this moment, in today.  The only thing is, living one day at a time isn’t that easy to do. I used to think it was something I had to accomplish with my thoughts.  I thought I just had to get my mind situated firmly in the present moment and keep it there.   I kept thinking I should be able to do that, would be able to do that, whenever I remembered I wanted to do that, but I couldn’t. I’d always forget and go right back to living in the future and/or in the past.  I’d go back to thinking I had to do everything all of the time. 

A few weeks ago my friend Bruce said that one of the things he’s gotten out of planning his days a la my harnessing time deal, is that he no longer feels like he has to do everything all the time.  (See “The Doing-Everything-All-the-Time Trap,” November 5, 2012.)  I thought that was brilliant, and that it captured how harnessing time works for me, too, in a nutshell.  Instead of feeling like I have to do everything all the time, and feeling scattered, burdened, anxious, confused, and kind of miserable as a result, now I’m able to focus on one thing at a time:  I know when I’m going to start focusing on it, whatever it is, and when I’m going to stop focusing on it, and as a result I know that I don’t have to focus on everything else.

One thing this has done for me is allow me to live one day, one hour, even one minute, at a time.  I might not be able to get rid of every single thought projected into the future, but I’m much more present in the day and in the moment.  I don’t worry about what I’m going to be doing tomorrow, because I know that I’ll figure out what I’m going to do tomorrow, tomorrow.  And if I need to figure out what I’m going to do tomorrow today – for example, if I need to decide today what I’m going to bring to a Thanksgiving potluck tomorrow – I put time aside to do that today.  Once I’ve put time aside for something, I can let go of it, and if I haven’t put time aside yet I know I will.  So I don’t have to keep worrying about whether I’m going to do it, whatever it is, or when I’m going to do it, whether I’m going to have time to do it, et cetera.  I don’t have to keep doing all that mental work, don’t have to keep doing the thing itself along with everything else in some vague, anxious, rehearsing-stuff-over-and-over way on the mental plane.

It’s the mental stuff that’s the problem, not what’s really going on in the world – I truly believe it.  It’s the mental stuff that makes you tense, anxious, nervous, miserable – or not.  And that’s the good news, because you can work with the mental stuff, even if you can’t change the outside circumstances at all.   And the even better news is that you can change the mental stuff by changing what you do – by taking certain small actions that you do have control over -- within the confines of the outside circumstances.  So you might not be able to change what you have to do, but you can change how you make plans to get done what you have to do, and doing that changes how you think about what you have to do.

There’s another way I’ve used one day a time very successfully with the help of harnessing time.  And that’s working on big, intimidating projects one little piece at a time, one day at a time, and then letting go of the rest.  Big projects like writing a book.  Big projects that might otherwise make me go crazy if I even thought about trying to do them, having to do them, to the point where I’d get so uptight I’d give up after a few days or never even get started.  

I read a story recently about an artist in Italy who was commissioned to create a mosaic in a cathedral, involving millions of tiny different-colored pieces that had to be placed, just so, along the lower part of the cathedral’s entire wall.  It was an enormous backbreaking job, and someone came along and asked him how he had the courage to take on such a difficult task. “It’s easy,” the artist said. “Every day I figure out how much I can do comfortably that day.  I mark the area and I don’t think about how much I have to do beyond that point. Before I know it the whole job will be completed.” 

When I read that story, I thought about harnessing time – how harnessing time is my way of figuring out what I can do comfortably every day, marking the area, not thinking beyond that point.  I’ve been doing that for years with writing too – in fact, it was writing that helped me come up with the rest of my harnessing time practices.  Every day I write for a certain amount of time and when that time is over I put my writing aside and don’t even think about it until tomorrow.  And, with the help of my harnessing time tools, I do that now with many other big goals too.  I don’t let myself think about how far I have to go, how little I got done today, how much there is left to do, how I have to hurry up if I’m going to reach the deadline I’ve set for myself.  I just do what I’ve set aside to do today and then I stop, feeling happy and peaceful because I’ve made some progress toward the goal.

I haven’t written the whole book, haven’t gotten into perfect shape physically, haven’t decluttered my whole house or accomplished whatever other big goals I’ve got.  But I know that I will.  I will because I’ll harness time to keep at it, doing a little bit every day.  And so I relax and feel good about myself.  Good enough to keep going, to tackle my big project tomorrow and every day after that, until it’s done.   And that’s what counts.
                                                           -- Mary Allen