Sometimes Twitter does offer up a little treasure. I followed a link today that Tony Robbins had tweeted. It was to a very touching video on YouTube. And after I had finished drying my eyes I thought about the message that I read into this story.

It’s a father’s story about his son who through a serious physical handicap was not supposed to be alive at birth. But his son made it through to live for 99 unexpected days. And each day his parents celebrated his birthday and the fact that he was alive for another day.

It made me cry with compassion for the parents who treasured their little one to this extent. It made me cry for the little life that battled so valiantly to survive for 99 days. But once I had tissued away the tears I looked at the uplifting message.

That message is that every day of our lives is precious. Every day can be celebrated by us. Yeah we have another day to live, to experience, to enjoy.  The parents of this little Eliot rejoiced at every day they could have their precious son.

At what stage in your life did you stop celebrating every day? Do you remember when as a kid you stopped getting up at the crack of dawn and didn’t want to wake up to face another day – groan?

I remember my kids when very small used to sit outside my bedroom door in the morning waiting for me to get up so that we could enjoy the day together. They were there very very early and knew that making too much noise would get them in trouble. They couldn’t wait for the day to start.

They saw loads of playtime ahead and I saw heaps of work. Yet we had the same day ahead of us. It was just a totally different approach. If they thought play was work, and I thought work was play, our anticipation of the day’s events would have been totally different.

But then work is work isn’t it? It’s a burden we have to carry because we need the money to live. The cleaning up of the house is a task we hate to do. Traveling to work is tiring and tedious.  Other people in the office are a nuisance and we just suffer their presence because we have to.  And so much more.

I’m sure we can all think of a very long list of things in our lives that make it really hard for us to look forward to the day. In fact we don’t really feel like celebrating every day, do we. Maybe the week-ends, but certainly not each day.

Even as I’m typing this I’m thinking ahead and wondering how I can celebrate every day from now on. But maybe I’ll start small. Let’s just celebrate today as a great day. As a birthday.  And then tomorrow I’ll repeat the exercise.

If I practice often enough to wake up in the morning excited and immensely thankful that I have another day of life, it might just stick and become a habit. That sounds to me like a much better approach to life than waking up worrying about what’s up ahead.

Will it make any difference to the number of events in my life in terms of good stuff and bad stuff happening? No to that. But it could just make it so much easier to live.

Can you imagine how much greater the pleasure for Eliot’s parent to celebrate his every day of life rather than to weep about his handicap. Didn’t change the circumstance. But it changed the experience to be one of celebration rather than one of immense hardship.

Bears thinking about.