Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Some of you may remember this. We wore it on T-shirts, hung it on walls, intoned it during smokey midnight conversations in college dorms.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
I have no idea who wrote this mantra. I can’t remember it ever being attributed to anyone. It was one of those catch phrases that merely appeared, spontaneously generated by the age of Aquarius, hours of Dylan, and the legions of students who fervently needed to believe that each moment held its own fresh start.
Too many of us have let go of this idea. In the rush of mortgages and jobs and marriages good and bad we have lost that start-over feeling. Our hurts and mistakes pile up and overwhelm us. We etch ourselves with indelible labels. We are branded with a backlog of our own making.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Simple, so simple. Yet your body already knows this. Every breath is new, every cell is spinning its way into new life even as you read these words. Your mind and your spirit needs to accept what is already a piece of biological reality.
So today, whether you were a child of the seventies or not, remember these words. What you did yesterday you need not do today. What you felt yesterday you need not feel today. In this age of ever-emerging technology, with the promise of so much, nothing needs to be a re-run. Not your life, your actions, your spirit.
Your life is all new, all the time.
Salut mon amie ! What a elegant post. I strive for simplicity in my life all the time, but find I often have to hit the reset button from time to time. And you got to love Wikipedia – look what I dug up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Grogan it seems the expression comes from our own backyard!
I’m grateful Andi sent me here. I needed to read that last line more than I can say or you could imagine.
Thank you for this article! I did a google search for “today is the first day of the rest of your life” and came across your article. Today is a very big day for me and this really spoke to me. Today I will be starting a “new life” and wanted to express how your article touched me in so many ways and I thank you for it….