The 100th Day

I have been counting my days of retirement on Facebook.

I started innocently enough, marking Day One and Day Two. My brother thought this was entertaining and challenged me to keep it up. The posts have been short and sweet (one day I made my first smoothie) and I've embraced it as part of my social media chill-the-eff-out regimen (I'm not allowed to post in the morning until I post a music video, which keeps me from spending the night brooding about how I want to tell someone off first thing when I wake up-- then at the end of the day, I have to post some simple statement about my day. It helps keep my relationship with social media marginally more healthy). Oddly enough, folks seem to like them.

When I hit ninety days of retirement, someone commented that they were looking forward to what I would do for 100. I was not, because I had already figured out that Day 100 of my retirement would be today, September 11.

The confluence of these two things brings a couple of thoughts to mind.

One is the different special days that we humans like to observe. We love making up special occasions. We just sailed past the first day of school. We like to make up holidays, or make up dates to observe holidays and pretend things like Jesus was born on December 25th. We get excited about particular birthdays that end in 0, and we freak the hell out over changing into a new decade, century or millennium.

Most of what sets these days off is completely made up. "It's the first day of your fiftieth year," someone will say. "You should make the most of it, because this day only comes once." Well, yeah. The third Tuesday of your second month of being married only comes once. The 133rd day of this year's school year only comes once. Every day only comes once.

There are days that have weight and significance because do our human best to staple weight and significance to them. And there are days that carry weight and significance because history freights them with it.

And even the weight of history fades, lessens, erodes with time. None of the students in school this year have any memory of the attack on the towers. To them it's just one more piece of history, albeit one that they may have connections to through other humans. The Challenger explosion. John F. Kennedy's assassination. The Vietnam war. Korea. World War II. When we live through these moments, we imagine that the weight will never come off those days. But we're humans. We pass and our memories pass with us, and the ability to understand and grasp and really feel history is a rare one. We're fortunate to be born in a literate age, when the weight of days can be transferred to paper, to screen, raising the possibility of other humans not yet born will be able to feel the weight of these days across the years.

This is, in part, why it is such an awful thing to be cavalier with the truth, to just make shit up for no reason other than to acquire power or erase evil or just because it gives you a little thrill of power. There are few things more immoral than a lie, and to lie for the record, to deny the weight of days is to lie to a million fellow humans not yet born.

Writing matters. Honesty matters. The truth, as best as we can grasp it in our clumsy human hands, matters.

We give days weight they may not have truly earned because playing with the heft of days is a human pursuit, a way of practicing and building mental muscle for the days that really matter. And because it's important not to give our attention only to those days weighed down with huge and almost unbearable cargo. But it's also good to know the difference.

So this is Day 100 of my retirement, a day that has no more real significance than Day 67 or Day 109, except that we like round numbers. It arrives on the anniversary of a day so weighted down that in just seventeen years we have, many of us, mostly forgotten what it really felt like when it arrived, just as a growing number of us have no idea at all and never did. Every day comes only once, and then it fades like a call across a vast valley or a speck in a hall of mirrors. That is why we should pay attention, do better than yesterday, and not just screw around, purposefully trying not to see what is in front of us, deliberately twisting reality to suit some other purpose, as if there were any higher purpose than being true and present.

This day, every day, will come just come once. Try not to screw it up.