No One Knows When it's a Good Day

Exactly when the smiley yellow faces began popping up ordering me to have a nice day I am not at all sure. It occurs to me, though, that it was in the early seventies when people – all kinds of people: store clerks, bank tellers, friends even – joined forces with the smiley yellow faces telling me to "have a nice day," or its counterpart, "have a good day." Some even began issuing their own revised version: "Have a good one."

At first, they were a pleasant few words to hear; something rather nice about being told to have a good day. Familiarity may, in some instances, breed contempt. It may also spawn suspicion, as it did for me, after being told repeatedly on multiple days to "have a good one," I began to question the sincerity of the comment.

One morning when the woman behind the counter handed me my change and issued her command to me about the quality of day I should have, my mind did not head to an examination of her motives: did she really mean what she said, or was this simply a replacement for "so long" or "see you" on her list of expressions used to send you on your way. Truth is, my thoughts were not about her at all, they were about the command she had just given me: "Have a good day."

For starters I wondered whether the choice was up to me – the choice about the nature of my day. Could I choose to have a good day? Was it really that simple? Could I get up each morning and command my day to be good? Am I in charge of quality control when it comes to fashioning my days, I asked myself? And it occurred to me that maybe – just maybe – I wasn't seated at the switch in command central pushing the buttons that might make my day a good one.

Simply because a lot of life is handed to us, isn't it – like that beautifully warm day at the beach early one August. Our family and my wife's brother's family had taken over my sister's beach house for a week of splashing in the ocean, building sand castles and fishing. Wave's brother loved to fish.

Which is what he and I and our two oldest sons were doing when a coast guard officer pulled up alongside our rented boat with a message that we should come ashore immediately, where we were told that my wife's father's heart had, quite unexpectedly, given out, standing our planned for good day on its head.

Chance occurrences, interruptions, sudden changes, are some of life's givens. Samuel Taylor Coleridge never completed his poem, Kubla Khan. In a drug induced sleep one afternoon, his mind was bombarded with images and expressions that would have required two to three hundred lines of verse – lines that he remembered when he awoke and began to write. Then came a knock at the door – an interruption by a "person on business from Porlock"— and Coleridge was never able to capture more than some eight or ten scattered lines and images.

"Stuff happens" has become conventional wisdom, and some potentially good days have become actually bad days. No one planned it that way. It just happened. If the people involved could have commanded their day to be good, they most certainly would have done that. And maybe they did, but their man from Porlock came knocking and altered the course of that day.

It is this capriciousness factor of life that seems to be missing in many of the "take charge of your life" books, making William Dyer's "Pulling Your Own Strings" seem just as superficial as William Henley's "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul." We can do worse than having a therapist – maybe even a life coach – on retainer to assist us in making the most of the three score and ten – more or less – that we have been given.

But I have sat with too many people whose days were being clouded over by circumstances out of their control. If only they could command the clouds to roll away – the ones that were blocking the sun on this particular day – how swiftly they would move to do that, but they couldn't. Those clouds had minds of their own.

So, the next time someone says to me, "Have a good day," perhaps I will ask them for suggestions as to how I might bring that off.

Another thought I had after the woman told me to have a good day was this: if I could order up a good day what would it be like? Would there be no sadness on my good day – no pain or discomfort of any kind? Yogi Berra was asked what he liked about school, and he answered, "Recess." If we could tailor make our days, would we choose to leave out all the bad and all the stressors?

Let's say we could go about fashioning ourselves a good day, and after determining that there would be no unpleasantness in any good day of ours, how do we know if something is really good or really bad? "No one knows when it's a good day" says the Hindu proverb. Is that true?

There is a Biblical basis for at least giving it a second thought. Most of us know the story of Joseph, Jacob's favored son. His older brothers sell him into slavery; bring his animal blood soaked "cloak of many colors" back to their father, convincing him that this preferred child of his is dead. Joseph, however, living in Pharaoh's house, rises in the chain of command and, in a position of power, is able to take care of his family through some pretty lean years. Eventually, Joseph makes himself known to his brothers, Jacob dies, and the brothers fret that since the father is not around anymore it will be payback time for Joseph: he will exact his revenge.

So the brothers concoct a story about a death bed plea by their father that Joseph will forgive his brothers, and Joseph listens to their trumped up account, and then says:

"Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you meant it for evil, God meant it for good."

How do you know what it is that's good about a day, or, for that matter, what is bad? Lin Yutang tells a story about an old man who lived with his son in an abandoned fort. One night the old man's only horse wanders off, and when his neighbors gather to comfort him in his time of ill fortune, the old man says, "How do you know this is ill fortune?" A week later, the horse returns bringing with him a herd of wild horses, and the neighbors come calling to celebrate this bit of good fortune, only to have the old man repeat his question,...