The Sum of Our Days

 

Each and every day we are living here on this earth contributes to the sum of who we are, who we become.  As of today, I have been here 22,419 days–that’s a pretty big number.

 

But the number of days I’ve lived doesn’t tell the real story.  The real story belongs to the experiences I’ve had along the way.  Things that have happened to me.  Things that I have done.  Things I have chosen not to do.

 

The sum of each life is about the love, the joy, the pain, the anguish, the beauty, the laughter, and the tears we experience each day–sometimes all on the same day.

 

When I see a person, no matter what their age, I try not to let what’s on the surface lead me to making a judgement.  After all, today is only one day out of thousands of days that person has lived.

 

My soon-to-be-eleven-year-old grandson has lived almost 4,000 days.  My mother, who passed away at the age of 89, lived 32,513 days.

 

We build our lives one day at a time.  One experience at a time.  One feeling at a time.  The life we live as a child–that life we don’t have much control over–starts us off on a path we can embrace, a path we must fight to break free of, or a path we simply succumb to and endure.

 

It’s hard to know what someone started off with just by looking at them.  Some of us gain a lot of insight at a young age (think Mattie Stepanek) and some of us never quite figure it out.  You can’t tell the difference by looks alone.

 

One of the most important things we can do to enrich our days (and make the sum of those days more valuable) is to connect with other people on a deeper level than the small talk we make at our first meeting.  That’s one of the reasons I started this blog.

 

We each have our own collection of experience, wisdom, humor, knowledge, feelings–the list goes on–that when shared, enhances our understanding of all the possibilities that life can hold.

 

Let’s say you were born near the ocean.  You grew up knowing only ocean.  The ocean is beautiful and inspiring and a great place to be and you love your life there.

 

One day you meet someone who was born in the mountains.  They grew up knowing only mountains.  The mountains are beautiful and inspiring and a great place to be and they love their life there.

 

You talk to them a bit and think, “Wow, they don’t know anything.  They’re clueless about tides and fishing; they have no idea how to live.”

 

They talk to you a bit and think, “Wow, they don’t know anything.  They’re clueless about trees and hunting; they have no idea how to live.”

 

You keep talking, even though you seem to have nothing in common.  As their story unfolds, you can relate it to your own story, even if the relationship between stories seems opposite.

 

It changes you, bit by bit, until one day you’re on top of a mountain in your mind and you have a whole new point of view and a connection to the world you didn’t have before.

 

 

You see the beauty of another human being and that beauty adds to the richness of your own days, experiencing something you might never have otherwise experienced.  You have taken a piece of another person’s being and added it to your own, hopefully replacing it with a piece of yourself.

 

We’re not all better or worse than each other, we’re different.  Experiencing the differences expands our world and adds to the sum of our days.