How Do You Measure a Year?

There is a song in the Broadway musical, Rent, which begins with the line, “525,600 minutes….525,600 moments so dear. 525,600 minutes, how do you measure…measure a year?”  On this, the 28th day of the last month in 2011;  as you look back on the minutes of your life this past year, how do you feel about how you spent them? By what standards do you measure your successes or disappointments? Do you measure them by the money you made? By the cups of coffee that you drank to get through the mornings? By the weight you gained or lost? The arguments? The struggles you endured? The mountains you climbed? The challenges? The strife? What things stand out most prominently in your memory? Are you grateful for this past year or just grateful that it’s over?

We can’t measure our lives in inches or miles, but we can measure them in the sweet victories we won; large or small. Rather than to look back and dwell on the negative “stuff” that might have happened, we can conjure up memories of the good things that we experienced…the sunsets, the rainbows, the laughter, the gatherings of friends, the times that someone surprised us with a random act of kindness, our relationships, the wind in the trees, the gentle touch of a loved one, the sweetness of a baby’s smile, the lessons we learned and the roller coaster ride that is sometimes our life!  Every disappointment probably had a softer and kinder side….if we reflect on the whole picture. Nothing is ALL bad…except possibly looking at yourself in a three way mirror, while wearing a swim suit…but, I digress.

As I am writing this, we have approximately 5220 minutes left in the year 2011. Wouldn’t it be an interesting experiment to focus on counting every one of those minutes as dear and precious opportunities to measure our lives in units of joy?  Here’s to making every minute count!

Tags: balance, change, humor, laughter, motivation, Natinal S[eakers Association, New Year, NSA, Toastmasters