Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day!
—Abraham Lincoln
Today, I celebrate the 15,000th day since my birth. Yes, I will indeed celebrate it! To live just one day is an amazing adventure; to live a thousand of them many times over is a wonderful mystery that should be held with the highest adoration and gratitude.
Grains of Time
It has become a tradition in our household, to not only celebrate the anniversary of the day of our day of birth, each year, with candles and cakes, but also celebrate a thousand day period of our life we are celebrating—another Hallmark moment!
Nikki McClure, designed a baby journal, The First Thousand Days. In it, she structures the journal entries to record key moments of a child’s first thousand days, from the birth story, to the first yawn, first steps, first words—documenting significant moments that happen during the course of the first thousand day period of a baby’s life.
If the passing of a year is significant (and it is), then so should be the living of a thousand days in a person’s life. Think of all the things you have discovered, learned, experienced in the past one thousand days of your life. You’ve most likely made more significant advances in a thousand days than you are able to achieve in one year of your life, and that is a major cause to reflect and celebrate.
To mark your life by days, not just by years, is a unique approach to framing the meaning of those days—filling each one of them with purpose, gratitude and a worthy effort. Marking a thousand of those days is an important reminder of how precious every day is. The fact is, we’ve been blessed to experience some good days, some great days, and others we perhaps like to forget; but let none of them be indifferent days.
As you reflect on the past year, these last few days of 2011, take a moment to look back on the past thousand days as well. While charting out your resolutions and goals for 2012, consider what the next one thousand days of your life might have in store for you too. You may even find an extra one, here and there, waiting to be filled up with something extraordinary.
Jason Diamond Arnold
Co-Author of Situational Self Leadership in Action
***To find out how many days you’ve lived, visit the Time and Date website and use the Date to Date Calculator.
