The day that didn’t repeat

Popular culture demands that you live every day as if it were your last and turn an ordinary Tuesday into an event. Every day really is the only one of its kind. That doesn’t mean it has to be unique.

Most of a good life consists of repetitions: breakfast, work, the commute, a conversation, sleep. A daily requirement to produce an event quickly turns existence into an impressions factory.

It makes more sense to notice now and then what actually happened:

• what you learned;
• who you were with;
• what you did;
• what changed;
• what is worth repeating;
• what it is time to stop.

A short note helps you see slow processes and keeps months from dissolving into the single word “busy”.

But a diary doesn’t have to become one more grading system. Sometimes the day was ordinary, and that is good news. The house didn’t burn down, the relationship didn’t collapse, work moved along a little.

The unrepeatability of a day doesn’t call for fireworks. It is enough that this particular day can never be lived again. Which is perhaps why it shouldn’t be spent entirely on proving your own productivity.

You can test this with a question about the past year. A person will recall two trips and one move — the things that stood out. Yet he speaks most warmly about Saturday breakfasts, which repeated fifty times and therefore made it into no album at all. Memory is built like a newsroom: it keeps the deviations, not the background. Judging the quality of a life by its archive is roughly like rating a house from the housewarming photos.

The demand to make every day an event means, in practice, a demand to produce deviations. A year later there will be exactly as many of them as the person managed to organise, and not a single breakfast on the list.