First Days

“Live each day as if it were your last”

That is one piece of advice that I don’t like.

I understand what is meant by the phrase, but in my reality, living each day as if it were my last would be the most counterproductive thing I could possibly do. I know this, because I have lived a few days as if they were my last, and they were god-awful.

If it were my last day, I wouldn’t get much done.

Knowing that tomorrow I will be dead would make me extremely choosy about what I would do on that last day. I would have trouble accepting invitations from friends to do anything, constantly thinking to myself, “Is that really what I want to do with my last day?”

Where would I want to eat my final meals? Who would I want to spend my final hours with? Do I really want to spend my last day going to work?

I think, if it were my last day, I would get really depressed about the things I haven’t done yet. Even if I got out of the house and did one of the things I wanted to do with my life, I couldn’t enjoy it really because I would constantly be thinking about the million other things that I am not able to do because I am spending my last day doing this.

And if I knew about the inevitable end in the coming hours, I would want to spend the day tending to my affairs and getting things ready for my being dead. Who has time to bungee jump from a helicopter over an active volcano, when I’ve got all this porn to delete from my computer? I really should clean the apartment too. And make sure my living will is up to date and my accounts are settled and I should send an email out to some people I haven’t talked to in a long time and there’s that Netflix movie I should mail back… There are pressing things that must be done before one dies!

So I would rather live each day as if it were my first.

I think it would be more beneficial to experience the world with the wonder of a newborn. There are so many things to do and learn and you’re pretty fascinated by it all.

Almost everything is more interesting when it’s new. A new love. A new job. A new car. Your first day of school.

Why wouldn’t you want to experience each day with that excitement of new possibilities rather than the dread of thinking you’ve wasted the last day of your life eating bad Chinese food from around the block and watching the season finale of “Heroes”?