Daily Toll

Every day is an opportunity. Every day is a chance to improve, practice, and learn. Having the fire of curiosity or discipline within you causes a level of excitement each and every day. This excitement pushes you to achieve, it pushes you to find out, and it pushes you to keep moving down the path of progress. For some people, this flame is all they need. They can go for years practicing meticulous consistency day in, and day out. All they need is the daily opportunity to improve. The reality is daily consistency is very difficult. You can end up dreading what once caused you to jump out of bed. What was once a daily opportunity starts to feel like a daily toll.

When you are so focused on daily improvement and consistency, each day bears a weight on your shoulders that is not usually there when life is viewed from a different perspective. With each day being an opportunity, a chance, and a gift to improve, you feel an inherent pressure to not squander it. Most of us aren’t perfect. Some days will be wasted. Some days we will fail to accept the gift. Some days, you will be moving backward in life as opposed to trudging along forward. Some days will not be the days of yesterday, last week, and last month where you attacked with a relentless determination. Some days, you won’t have “it.”

On days when you don’t have “it,” and you have accepted you will be going through the motions and not charged with the relentless electricity of before, you can respond in two ways. The first option is you can beat yourself up, let one day get inside your head, and consequently spiral. This option throws you off the deep end of self-pity and self-doubt and has you question if you are good enough and if you are who you say, and believe, you are.

The other option is accepting what the day of not having “it” is. It is one day. It is not the last month of consistency. It is not the last year of enacting habits to carry you through your daily life. When you zoom out, you can see that one day is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It is a one-day setback. That’s it. One day that felt much less like an opportunity. Just one day that felt like a toll. The question for how you handle the rest of the day is if you still pay the toll, or if you wait to cash in tomorrow.