Editorial January 8, 1996 Issue

Making the most of today

Barbara M. Vining

It can be so easy to let our days slip by without making the most of them. One way this can happen is through thinking that this particular day holds less good for us than does some day in the future. My attention was drawn to this kind of thinking while I was standing in a grocery store checkout line one morning.

The cashier was carrying on a conversation with the person at the head of the line, who was apparently a friend of hers. While she was ringing up her friend's groceries, they caught up on various aspects of their lives—families, friends, jobs. They each commented that they considered their respective long-held jobs to be humdrum—uninteresting and unstimulating. Work, they agreed, wasn't something to look forward to each day, but something to put up with out of necessity. The cashier's closing remark was "I'm living for my retirement."

Retirement appeared to be at least twenty years away for the cashier. That would amount to thousands of humdrum days—days in which much good would no doubt be missed because there was so little expectation of finding it. And after all that, would her retirement days really be all she imagined them to be?

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