Be grateful. Every day.

OR: How I spent my Monday afternoon.

This post is short. But really important to me. I hope you take the time to read it. I have made it free for all to read. But, if you’d like to support the community I am working to build, you can do that here. 👇

My mom called me around 2 pm yesterday. She wasn’t feeling well and wanted me to take her to urgent care.

I did. And they recommended we go to a local emergency room — just to be safe.

Don’t worry. This story has a happy ending. She’s totally and completely fine. Maybe just a bit dehydrated.

But, I did spend a good amount of Monday in an ER. And it reminded me of something I forget too often: Be incredibly grateful, every day, for your health.

The ER was crowded. The nurse we saw said Mondays were the worst — as people flooded in after the weekend. (I later learned the ER we went to is the 4th busiest in the country!)

It was, candidly, distressing to be there. Lots of people were really sick. Someone collapsed. There was, um, a lot of vomiting.

Look. On a normal day I spent zero minutes thinking about what is going on in the local emergency rooms around me. I think about what to write next. Or whether the newsletters are growing fast enough. (I have an all sports one now too!) Or when I need to get the kids from the bus. Mundane stuff like that.

But, my trip to the ER with my mom was a reminder for me that there is a whole lot of suffering in the world. And it is happening all around us. Every single day.

This post is NOT to bring you down. The opposite actually.

Because I got to walk out of the ER with my mom yesterday. She’s healthy. I’m healthy. I don’t think much about that but, man, did I yesterday. Surrounded by people who were sick and miserable, I have never been more thankful for my good health.

I — and maybe you too? — take it for granted too often. We assume — dumbly — that we will always be in perfect health. Probably because we don’t want to ruminate too much on the fact that the time will come — for all of us — when our body breaks down in some way big or small.

That’s a fact we can’t change. (At least not yet!) But what we CAN change is our orientation to the days (and hopefully weeks, months and years) where we are generally healthy.

Those days are a massive gift. And because we don’t know how many of them we will be given, we need to do a better job of being grateful for each one.

The very fact that you got up, went to work, had a meeting, got coffee, picked up your kids from the bus and drove them to soccer practice (maybe that’s just me!) is a huge blessing.

Don’t let it become mundane. One day you will look back and miss these days when the biggest worry you had was whether you could squeeze a workout in between kid drop-offs and pickups. (Again, maybe just me!)

I’m slightly disappointed in myself that it took a trip to the ER — and personally witnessing peoples’ struggles — to remind myself of that fact. But I am going to do my absolute best to keep it top of mind every day going forward.

Thanks for reading and I hope today is, yes, a mundane day for you. Those are the best ones.

Chris