Wake up with a Smile

Life is a book, and in it there are:

1. So many pages!!

2. So many different chapters!!

A) So many pages means you have plenty of chances to make a mistake and try to correct it. Each page is a lesson. On each page is every mistake you made and everything you learnt from it.

B) Many pages together make a chapter, so a different chapter here means you have to retain all the important things from those pages. From each one you need to take out the positives and the negatives.

Remember: one bad chapter doesn’t mean your story is over.

Each page is the time you spent in a day, with all its experiences. Each chapter is the phase.

The trouble with reading your own book

Here is what makes this harder than it sounds. When you are reading someone else’s story, you can see the shape of it. You know the difficult chapter is a chapter, because you can feel the weight of the pages still to come in your right hand.

Nobody gets that when reading their own. You are always on the current page, and the current page always feels like the ending. That is not weakness or a lack of perspective. It is just what it is like to be inside a story instead of holding one.

Which is exactly why the rule has to be something you decide in advance, rather than something you feel. You will not feel like this is one chapter of many. You have to know it anyway.

In a nutshell: whether it is a good or a bad situation you go through, you need to make yourself strong and close the chapter, then and there.

Closing a chapter properly

Closing one is not the same as pretending it never happened. That is not a closed chapter, that is a bookmark you are refusing to look at.

Closing it means you have taken what it had to teach you, you have said the honest sentence about it - even if only to yourself - and you have stopped rereading it every night hoping the ending will change on the fourteenth attempt.

Some chapters take a very long time to close. Some take years. That is allowed. What is not useful is leaving one permanently open because closing it feels like admitting it mattered.

It mattered. Close it anyway.

Actually, every day is a new chapter.

Every morning is a new beginning.

So don’t waste so many pages of your life doing nothing.

About the mornings

I know the phrase “wake up with a smile” can sound thin, especially on the mornings when you genuinely do not have one available. So let me say what I actually mean by it.

I do not mean force cheerfulness on yourself before you have had water. I mean that the first ten minutes of your day tend to set the tone for the rest of it, and those ten minutes are one of the few things you still get to decide.

You do not control what the day brings. You do control whether you hand it the pen before it has even asked for it.

Remember: not all the chapters of the book have happy endings. So don’t break yourself if some of them make you cry, or carry stories you would rather not have lived. All those good and bad moments together are what made you a strong person, after all.

Learn from every page. Take a fresh start each morning with a SMILE!!

The first ten minutes

If any of this is going to become practical, it happens in the first ten minutes of the day.

Not because mornings are magic, but because you are choosing between two defaults. Either the day comes at you - messages, news, whatever is already waiting - or you get to it first with something of your own.

Ten minutes. Water, a window, one page, no screen. Whatever you like. The specific ritual matters far less than the fact that the day began on your terms rather than someone else’s.

-Kashish.