When was the last time you had a bad day? For some of you, it might have been last week. For others maybe it was just yesterday. And still for some you might be having one today. Oh how you probably wish that you would have less bad days than you do. What if I told you that you can? Or better- what if you could find a way to have no bad days at all?
I’ve had a lot of bad days myself. To be honest, I still have them some times. But they’re nowhere close to the number of bad days I used to have. Before literally three to four days out of a week, I’d be in a terrible mood. You could say that I wasn’t much of a happy camper.
Why do we have bad days? There’s one prevailing reason why we have bad days- things don’t go the way we’d like it to. When we have a client request gone bad, a traffic jam that came out of nowhere or a flat tire when we’re running late for a family occasion, we automatically think “today is a bad day.”
If you’re the kind of person that thinks that way, I’m here to tell you that I was once like that. The bad news is that it got me nowhere. Often, I would do my best to take control of the day and get some semblance of order to my schedule, my affairs and my life. I’d gain control for short periods only to watch things fall apart again.
That’s when I came across a life changing quote once share by Charles R. Swindoll, where he says this:
“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.”
Here’s news flash for all of us today: We are not in control. Many things around us are things we have no agency over. Here are some examples of things we cannot control:
- The weather
- The opinion of others
- Unforeseen emergency expenses
- The market
- Your competitions’ moves
- Whether your internet connection will be fast or not
- The mood of your spouse
- Which side of your shirt the coffee will spill
- And virtually thousands of other things that happen around us
We’re not always in control of the things around us. But the one thing we have control over is our outlook at life and the way we react to the things around us. We can even control the way we react to the things we cannot control.
When we cause ourselves to believe the delusion that we can “seize the day” by gaining control of all the things that happen in our day, we will only worry, fear and fluster. Chances are you’ll always have bad days. But when we choose to to our best to control that which we can control and let that which we cannot control be, your days will look a little brighter.
I’m not saying that we don’t do anything about the things we can’t control. We can adapt. We can adjust. We can surrender things to God in prayer and petition. The way your day pans out has less to do with the things that happen around you and more about your attitude towards those situations that are out of our control.
