One day is not a day of the week

So, last night at a networking event, Lisa relayed that her young son had said to her younger son, “Decide: Is it Day One, or One Day?”  We all went quiet.  I had learnt something new. Apparently, at 57, I am still collecting basic instructions on how to live. Some people have retirement portfolios. I can have revelations that would probably have been useful in 1993.

It is this: One day. Or Day One. Same words. Completely different life.

I have spent an astonishing amount of time in One Day. One day I will finish that script. One day I will get properly fit. One day I will learn enough Hebrew to understand what people are saying to me without smiling, nodding, and occasionally discovering that I have agreed to something. One day I will sort out the cupboard. One day I will make that phone call. One day I will do the frightening thing. One day I will get my shit together. (That last one has been pending for some time.)

The trouble with One Day is that it sounds like a plan. It isn’t. It is a lovely waiting room where we put the lives we intend to live while we get on with the considerably less frightening business of living the ones we already have. And I am very good at it. I can procrastinate with enormous purpose. I don’t simply avoid something. I prepare to do it. I think about doing it. I discuss doing it. I make lists about doing it. On particularly productive days, I move the item from one list to another. This creates the satisfying impression that something has happened. Nothing has happened, but the handwriting is excellent.

I don’t think we put things off because we are lazy. Well, sometimes we do. There are occasionally dishes in my sink that could testify for the prosecution. But the important things are different. Sometimes we don’t begin because, as long as we don’t begin, the dream remains perfect. The script I haven’t finished could still be brilliant. The job I haven’t applied for could still have been mine. The person I haven’t called might still say exactly what I want them to say. The thing I haven’t attempted is still something I might have been magnificent at.

“One Day” protects all of that. Day One doesn’t. Day One is horribly real. It means opening the document and discovering that the magnificent sentence in your head has somehow arrived on the screen looking like it was written by a Labrador. It means sending the application and risking silence, making the call, getting on the scale, walking through the door, saying I’m sorry, saying I want this, or, sometimes much harder, saying I don’t want this anymore. It means giving reality the opportunity to disappoint you, and reality does enjoy an opportunity.

But something frightens me more now than failure: time. Not in a dramatic, violin-playing-in-the-background sort of way. I am not planning my funeral. I haven’t chosen the sandwiches. But I am 57, and “One Day” sounds different at 57 than it did at 27.

At 27, One Day was enormous. It stretched out ahead of me like an entire country, with plenty of time to get there. At 57, I have begun to understand something I don’t particularly like. There is no guarantee that everything I keep postponing will eventually get its turn. Some things don’t wait. People die, bodies change, opportunities disappear, and relationships quietly become past tense while everyone is still alive. Sometimes the person who was going to do all those things simply grows older while she waits to become brave enough to do them.

That one hurts, because I can forgive myself for failing. I am less sure I could forgive myself for never finding out.

And perhaps that is what Day One actually means. It does not mean throwing away your life on Wednesday morning because you saw an inspirational quote on Facebook. It does not mean resigning from your job, booking a ticket to Peru, and announcing that the universe has spoken. Sometimes the universe has not spoken. Sometimes you are having a funny five minutes and should sit down.

Day One can be tiny. Send the email. Write the paragraph. Make the appointment. Ask. Start. Five minutes of courage might be enough. The point isn’t to change your entire life before lunch. It is to do something, however small, that means the thing you keep calling “One Day” has finally begun.

We Jews should understand this better than most. Our entire calendar seems designed around the possibility that we have buggered things up and might like another go. Every morning, every Shabbat, every Rosh Chodesh, every Rosh Hashanah gives us another beginning. Teshuvah itself is built on the rather extraordinary idea that what happened yesterday matters, but it does not get to own tomorrow. We are allowed to begin again. The problem is that eventually, beginning again requires beginning.

Some things in my life have been sitting on the back burner for so long that I am no longer entirely sure there is a burner. There may just be a small archaeological site containing several ambitions and a saucepan. I suspect most of us have one: something we keep saying we will do when life settles down, when there is more money, when we are thinner, when we are less frightened, when someone gives us permission, when everything lines up nicely, and there is finally a completely risk-free opportunity to change our lives. Which should arrive shortly after the Messiah.

Maybe courage isn’t feeling ready. Maybe courage is finally becoming more frightened of One Day than Day One. Because One Day is comfortable. It asks nothing of me and lets me keep every possible version of myself alive. Day One kills most of them. The moment I choose something, begin something, risk something, I find out who I actually am instead of who I might theoretically become. That is terrifying. It is also, I am beginning to suspect, the point.

I still have things I want to do, things I want to write, places I want to see, and people I want to love better. There are parts of myself I would quite like to repair, and others I have finally accepted are probably factory settings. I don’t know how much time I have. Neither do you. That isn’t morbid. That’s the deal.

So perhaps the question isn’t what we hope to do One Day. Perhaps it is much smaller and considerably less comfortable: what have I been postponing because wanting it safely is easier than risking it properly? And what is the smallest thing I can do about it now?

Not next year. Not when I’m ready. Not One Day.

Today is Day One.