Just for Today

We live our lives a day at a time, not in weeks or in months. Our daily actions determine our character. In this short book, you will find a list of qualities, virtues, or what might be simply called decent actions. We would all aspire to be people who practice these virtues. Yet the circumstances of life, the pressure of activities, the arrival of an unexpected challenge, all seem to knock us off course. Days, weeks and even years can pass before we recover our equilibrium and finally look back to notice a life spent unmindfully. Then filled with a vague sense of regret, we feel we might have done much better. But there is no purpose in looking back except to examine and respond to the lessons that our particular life to this point has taught us. And so we look to the future. What is suggested here is not that we would try to become saints in a day. If we succeeded in that we would surely fall into the snare of pride, something those who have to deal with us would find even more obnoxious than our existing faults. We will work on an easier plan. The idea of this book is to take one particular quality or decent action and really try to put that into effect for just one day in the month. Some of the suggestions here will be found to be easier that others, none of us are lacking in all of these desirable characteristics. But on some days we will encounter ideas that we will find more difficult to apply. The force of long habit runs strong. But bad habits can be broken, and good ones can be acquired, if we try to practice with a degree of seriousness. So let us begin, taking one day and one positive action at a time. Here you have thirty-one ideas, one for each day of the month, thirty-one of them so you get a different good action to practice every day. For the most part, our lives are lives of quiet application. We go about our business and we do our best. We may never have that once-in-a-lifetime chance to practice greatness in some overwhelming moment of opportunity. But the lives of all of us make a difference, each of our lives is unique in this amazing situation in which we find ourselves. The small daily gestures of goodness and kindness all add up. Here is an invitation to practice doing the decent thing so we can learn to respond with kindness day by day, week by week. We shall not pass this way again. May you find happiness today and every tomorrow as you take up this "challenge for goodness" and try to put the ideas contained in this little book into effect in your life.