The First Day Of The Rest Of Our Lives

More On Perspective

My bed is a castle with pillow walls and blanket moats. That makes me an ordinary Sleeping Beauty.

I watch the back of my eyelids turn from black to a faint yellow, and recognize my dad’s footsteps. His hand feels warm on my arm and I think about how cold my alarm usually sounds. I throw my right leg over my left as I reach my arms back--the most gratifying sensation known to man. This is all typical in a morning.

Less typical is when I remember it is a morning of indefinite lasts. Suddenly all of the things I always do mindlessly merit a full name and all of my attention: The Last Time My Dad Will Be My Alarm Clock, The Last Time I’ll Make My Coffee The Way I Like It, The Last Time This Is My Only Bed. This is The Last Morning At Home.

I’m stretching like it’s preparation to run through the list of lasts in my head when I hear:

“Jenna, wake up. It’s the first day of the rest of your life.”

I’ve thought about this moment frequently over the past two years since leaving for college. But today I question what I thought I knew about it--what I thought made it so monumental, so perfect, so cinematic.

How could this moment have felt so big if every day is the first day of the rest of my life? How can I hold onto this feeling- this excitement just for the sake of being alive- forever?

Today it is because I realized that very fact. Last week it was because I understood someone cared about me (in other words, I was lent a book). Sometimes it is because I get to do nothing, and other times it is because I get to do nothing with someone else. On Saturday it was because I got to hug both of my lifelong best friends. Tomorrow it will be because I get to sit on an airplane with my grandparents.

And, while some days I wake up ready to leave for college, reinvent myself (typically by way of a new obscure interest), or challenge my perspective… I think the mundane is equally grand.

Today marks the first day of the rest of a life knowing that what happens in our days is not what makes them monumental, perfect, or cinematic. It is how we look at what happens, how we shape what happes, and the simple fact that our days get to happen at all that makes them special.

Two years ago, on the "first day of the rest of my life" that my dad was actually referring to