Day 40 - Why I'm Counting UP ......................... the Days of My Life

Two areas of thought sort of merged into one idea for me.  First there was my birthday and the knowledge that when both of my parents reached my age, they were actually in the process of living the last year of their lives and surely didn't know it.

I pondered the thought and wondered; if they had known it was their last year, would they have looked at each day differently? 

The general concept that life is lived between the dates filled my mind, rolled around for awhile and then drifted away.

When children counting down the days until Christmas on their Advent Calendar caught my attention, the thought of 'days' returned and  before long the two trains of thought came together on the same track.

"Live every day as if it is your last",  sounds good but it's too abstract to be practical or put into practice, at least not by me.  I seem to need a gimmick, not just a nice but fleeting thought that will float away on the next breeze.

What can I say?  I do my best thinking at the beach.

So, I began to work on a way, for me, to actually be conscious of each day.  What would deter me from wasting even one of them?  What would encourage me to inject something, a thought, an activity, a deed, anything in each and every day that would mark each day as 'time well spent'?    

When we get older, time can really mess with our minds.  Since there isn't the dreaded Monday, or hump day or TGIF, there is a tendency for days to run together, for weeks and months to slip by almost unnoticed.  The grandchildren seem to grow much faster than our own children did.  Just about the time all is well in the world of our families, someone upsets the apple cart; a new child happens or a family falls apart.  And, all the while, we wonder how those things could have happened so quickly; wasn't it just yesterday that they were all children?

It seemed that I needed something besides a calendar to keep me up to date.  And, I realized that I needed a constant reminder that each day is truly a gift from God and should not be wasted...so I started counting UP the remaining days of my life.  I have no idea how long I'll be doing this or at which number my counting will end.  But I do know that numbering my days makes each one of them special in its own right and makes me acutely aware that each morning I get to greet is a blessing.

Just sayin'

So, I will continue this little crusade of mine to count UP the days of the rest of my life.  No, I will not have a post for every single day as I have for the first 40 days, but I will be faithful to the blog and post a couple days a week....and...I will continue to keep the count on the blog.