A lot can happen in one day.
For many of us, our days feel like a blur of appointments and tasks to be completed. We often do only the bare minimum of what we need to stay afloat. Other days, things go our way, we are checking things off of our lists, we receive good news, we carry out or witness good deeds, and we feel like a superhero.
Sometimes we think, “I’ve got this!”, and feel like we are walking on sunshine. Then the clouds move in, and there are days we feel like we have never been more lost and without any sense of direction.
Simon Sinek teaches us to have an infinite mindset. “In an infinite game, there is no winning. There is only ahead and behind.” He challenges us to change our narratives and to stop labeling days as either good or bad. Instead, we should think of days as either ahead or behind. It reminds us that life is a journey of our days that some might even compare it to an amazing race. We tend to forget that each and every day is more than just that single time stamp. Each is made up of many different moments.
Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Daniel Kahneman, suggests that we experience approximately 20,000 moments every day. A moment is defined as a few seconds in which our brain records an experience. These moments are captured as positive, negative, or plain neutral. Rarely do we remember neutral moments, but instead we remember the positive and negative moments.
“Each day… is a gift; don’t send it back unopened.”- Unknown
This quote reminds us to slow down and stop focusing on the next thing and to instead enjoy what we have right in front of us, to making these moments count. That might mean working to make those moments memorable and we want to help that happen.
Beginning in February 2021, The ALS Association of Texas will launch a new five-minute interview series entitled, “One Day…” We will visit one moment of One Day in the life of members of our ALS Texas community and celebrate our ALS Texas family. Do you have a memorable moment to share? We want to hear about it!
Send your One Day stories to Tonya. Maybe it’s something like a “Walk and Roll” that one of our ALS families told us about. A wife and her husband with ALS take an afternoon stroll together: hers is a walk, and he puts some miles on his power wheelchair! They get fresh air, sunshine, and they do it together. Now that is a moment to capture!
Together, we will savor the sweetness and celebrate victories big and small, friendships, creative approaches to living life to the fullest, family, and just plain good stuff. We will lock arms not only in our fight against ALS, but in creating more ahead days than behind, and in our determination and hope that there will One Day be a world without ALS.