🎨🗓️⏰ WHY FOCUS ON ONE DAY AT A TIME

We need only an aim to orient our body, mind, and soul.

Dear Why Team member,

Here we go!  We’re in the earliest days of our BEST YEAR EVER, a year in which we focus on how to become more for ourselves and the ones we love. 

If there is one lesson that stands out among all the others, that I have learned from all the mountains I have climbed the past eight years, is how far you can go one step at a time.

Abraham Lincoln said the best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.  The unknown future holds all our possibilities and unfortunately it includes our physical death; fear often holding sway over faith.  Consider how difficult it is to cross a bridge until you come to it - yet so many today are trying to cross every conceivable bridge they can imagine in the future; often planning for the worst rather than preparing for it.  Preparing for the worst is prudent, planning for it is extremely limiting to a fulfilling and rewarding life.

So here is a formula for Becoming More in 2024 - Living Your Best Year Ever!:

Best Day’s Ever add up to.. 
Best Week’s Ever add up to 
Best Month’s Ever add up to 
Best Year Ever: 2024 

In the Tao Te Ching written 2500 years ago, Lao Tzu wrote that the journey of a thousand miles begins with ONE STEP. 

To Become More in 2024 it will come down to the steps we take each and every day.  We need only an aim to orient our body, mind, and soul.  Without an aim we are aimless - and while we will have many targets throughout the year, with more attentiveness to how we’re living each new day, we will stack success upon success - knowing with faith that our outcomes will have a higher probability of success.  

Life has its curve balls, but the more at bats, the more hits, the more bases, the more runs.  Consider more than ever your daily disciplines - how we come out of the gate every morning will have a significant impact on how we finish the gift of each new day.  And no matter how you might measure your day - consider the death of consciousness at night and its rebirth in the morning.  To view each new day as a lifetime, in and of itself, will bring more mindfulness to your life and your choices.

“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life”.
·  Seneca

We all have our morning routines.  Some are less structured than others.  Become more conscious, more mindful of those early morning choices.  How might you make better trades with your incredibly valuable time, your life-time?

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
· Henry David Thoreau

Here is one small addition to your morning routine. Start your day with a positive and short declaration.  A good friend of mine said he feels a bit silly doing it but has to admit it is serving him.  My mother lived by the Christian mantra: “Today I Will Rejoice” - not ‘I might rejoice, let me check the news’; you check the news, you’ll never rejoice.  Notice the act of WILL to rejoice rather than the dependency on circumstances to rejoice.  Over time, for me, “today I will rejoice”, evolved into “Best Day Ever!”

Every morning I endeavor to make my first three words after regaining consciousness: BEST DAY EVER.  You might recall an old story that begins: 

In the Beginning there was the Word - and the Word Creates.  

Is not each morning the beginning of a new day?  What are the first words you speak, the first words you hear?  And are they creating the life you want?  I know it sounds silly, but if we think what we’ve always thought, we’ll get what we’ve always got.  What harm is there in consciously saying three words every morning?  How hard is it to say Best Day Ever?  Maybe it would be helpful to have another “Why” beyond how words create. 

Consider the fact that we cannot live in yesterday, we cannot live in tomorrow - the only day we have ever lived is today - and the day you’re alive is always better than the day you’re not.  To claim it, proclaim it- simply say BEST DAY EVER. 

Stack them up every day - one day at a time - and no doubt you’ll make it a great week, month, and year - 

…your BEST YEAR EVER!!

Happy New Year!

Steve Luckenbach