Last Day

I recently had my last day at a company I had worked for the past 12 years.  It was a long time in coming.  My wife and I had been looking to leave Southern California for about a year and after a lot of diligent work on both the physical and spiritual sides of life, the means and methods to do so had fallen into place.  

My last day was wonderful!  I enjoyed my coworkers more than I had before (and my coworkers were always the best part of my job).  It was a very busy day, but I was more joyful in my productivity than usual.  It was probably the best day of all the days in the past 12 years.  What was the difference?  That I wouldn’t be coming back?  If so, that means that the only reason all the other days weren’t as good is because I would be coming back to work there the next day.  Is that really a valid reason to have less than a great experience of the day?  Certainly not.  What if I had come to work as if every day were my last day?

Wait a second…  What is that old saying?  “Live everyday as if it were your last.”  I used to think, in reply to that bit of wisdom, “Well, I certainly wouldn’t be going to a job if it were my last day, so that line is just BS!”  So, what if instead of “last day” meaning the day before you die, it meant your last day on a job that you are leaving gladly and on good terms?  Live every day as if it were your last to see the people you are seeing.  Live every day as if the experience you are having now is the last time you will have such an experience.  It isn’t that you’re going to die tomorrow, but that you will have different experiences tomorrow, so savor all the richness available to you right now.  

The truth is, you will never have the same experience again.  Even if you drive the same road to work every day, there are different cars and different drivers that make the experience different.  More importantly, if you are committed to your personal growth, YOU will be different in your commute tomorrow.  

Now I get it.  Live every day as if it is your last, because the “you” that experienced yesterday is forever changed by yesterday.  The people you interacted with today will be different tomorrow, too.  With as much as I enjoyed my former coworkers on my last day, if I had lived every day as if it were my last, gone to work every day as if it were my last day on the job, my enjoyment of them would have reached that level years ago.  So, from here on out, every day is my last day.  The Ben that lived 9/8/15 ceases to be with sleep and a new Ben wakes up tomorrow, for a brand new, last day.