Chapter 1: The Day Is Yours

"To be awake is a blessing in itself and I'm thanking God for another golden 24 hours.

My old Pastor used to say (God rest his soul), 'If you think you were awakened by your alarm clock or yourself you are sadly mistaken. Take that same alarm clock to your nearest grave yard and sit next to any tombstone, turn it up as loud as possible and set it off. Let's see how many of them wake up.'

Whether it's rain, sleet, or shine we are all blessed to see it another day, so use those golden 24 hours in the most amazing way possible as you will never see them again.

Have an awesome and blessed Monday Fam,"

Ramon

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The Alarm Clock and the Tombstone

The first time my old Pastor told that story about the alarm clock and the tombstone, I laughed. It was a Sunday morning, the kind where the air conditioning in the church was working a little too hard and the ushers were fanning themselves with the bulletin. He told it the way he told everything, slow, one hand on the pulpit, the other pointing somewhere out past the last pew. He said if you think your alarm clock woke you up, take it to the nearest cemetery, prop it on a headstone, and turn it up as loud as it can go. Let us see, he said, how many of them get up and start their day.

I laughed. Then I stopped laughing, because he was right.

The alarm clock did not wake me up. Something else did. Whatever you want to call it, however you want to name it, is your business, and I am not writing this chapter to fight you about the name. I am writing it because there is a fact under the joke that I do not think most of us have really let land. We woke up. Somebody today did not. And the space between those two sentences is the whole reason I still start most of my mornings by saying, out loud sometimes, thank you for another 24.

That is what this chapter is about. It is about the day you are sitting inside of right now, the one you almost certainly took for granted this morning, and what it means to treat it like the gift it is instead of the given you assumed it was.

The Coin You Cannot Get Back

There are people who will tell you that time is money. I have never liked that saying. Money you can get back. You can lose a job and get another one. You can go broke and grind your way up again. I have watched people I love do exactly that. But time you cannot get back. There is no side hustle for yesterday. There is no overtime shift that adds a Tuesday to the week you already spent.

Time is the one currency where the account only moves one direction. You wake up with 24 hours in your pocket. You spend them. Whether you spent them on purpose or by accident, they are gone by the time you close your eyes at night. Nobody hands you a receipt. Nobody offers you a refund. The register just resets, and if you are lucky, you get another 24 to work with.

I think about that a lot. Not to be morbid. The opposite. I think about it because it is the fastest way I know to shake myself out of a bad mood and remember what I actually have in my hand.

Try it right now. Not later. Right now, sitting where you are, holding this book, put the book down for a second and count the hours you have left in this day. Do not think about tomorrow. Do not think about the weekend. Just today. If it is nine in the morning where you are, you have fifteen hours. If it is noon, you have twelve. If you are reading this at night after the kids are asleep, you have maybe three. Whatever the number is, that is your budget. That is what you have to work with.

Now ask yourself what you are going to spend it on.

Most of us would not walk into a store, pick up an item off the shelf, and hand the cashier a hundred dollar bill without knowing what we were buying. But we will hand over three, four, five hours of a day to something we did not choose and did not enjoy and will not remember by tomorrow. We will give a whole afternoon to somebody else's argument. We will give an entire morning to a mood we could have shaken by ten a.m. if we had wanted to. We spend time the way people spend money they did not earn. Carelessly. Like there is more where that came from.

There is not. Not necessarily. That is the whole point of the story with the alarm clock.

Why the Morning Matters More Than You Think

You may have noticed that most of the thoughts I have posted over the years came out first thing in the morning. That is not an accident. Morning is the only time of day that has not been touched yet. It has not been ruined by traffic. It has not been rained on by somebody else's bad news. It has not had a chance to disappoint you yet, because it has not had a chance to do anything at all. It is clean.

What you put into that clean space matters more than you might think, because whatever you put in first tends to color everything that comes after. If the first thing you do when you open your eyes is grab your phone and scroll through other people's arguments, you have handed your morning over to strangers before your feet ever hit the floor. You have let a stranger, a stranger who does not know your name and does not care about your day, set the tone for how you are going to walk into your own life for the next several hours. That is a bad trade. That has always been a bad trade.

If instead the first thing you do is stop for one honest second and say, out loud or in your head, thank you for this day, and then you swing your feet off the bed, you have done something small and very quiet that will pay off in ways you cannot fully see. You have reminded yourself that the day is a gift. You have reminded yourself that you were not owed it. You have set a floor under your mood that a bad email or a rough commute will have a hard time punching through.

I am not selling you a routine. There are shelves full of books that will sell you a routine, and some of those routines are good, and some of the people doing them are people I respect. That is not what I am talking about. Most of us, on the average Tuesday, are not going to run a two-hour morning stack. What I am talking about is smaller than any routine and, I think, harder to argue with. You can do this one whether you got up at five with a plan or whether you overslept and are already late.

One honest second when you open your eyes. That is the whole discipline. Just long enough to notice that you are here.

Rain or Shine, the Day Is Mine

I have another post from a few years back where I wrote, whether it is rain or shine, the day is mine, to do with it as I please. That line got a lot of head nods when I put it up, and I have thought about why. It is not because it is clever. It is not clever. It is because it names something people do not always say out loud, which is that the weather in your day is not the same thing as the day itself.

The weather is what happens to you. The day is what you do with it.

There will be rain. Some of the rain will be little and inconvenient, like an argument with somebody at work, or a bill that came in higher than you were expecting. Some of it will be big and heavy, the kind of storm you do not walk away from cleanly. I am not going to pretend it is all a matter of attitude. Some rain will soak you no matter how well you dress for it.

But the day is still yours. The rain is not the day. The rain is one thing that is happening inside the day, and the day has room for a lot more than the rain. The day has room for the ten minutes you spent laughing with your kid before school. The day has room for the phone call from an old friend that you almost let go to voicemail and did not. The day has room for the meal you cooked on purpose instead of ordering out. It has room for the workout you did not feel like doing that made you feel human again by the end of it. The rain is real, but so is everything else the day is holding.

Whenever I meet somebody who is stuck, and I have met a lot of them, and I have been one of them, the first thing I notice is that they have started confusing the weather with the day. They are describing their entire life in terms of what is falling on them. They are not describing what they are doing. They are describing what is being done to them. That is a place to visit. It is not a place to live.

Getting your day back does not start with the weather changing. It starts with reminding yourself that the day is bigger than the weather. Even a rainy day still belongs to you.

What "Golden" Actually Means

I have called them golden 24 hours for years. Golden 24. That word matters to me and I want to be honest about why.

Gold is not gold because it is shiny. Gold is gold because it is rare. Because you cannot manufacture it out of nothing. Because when you have some of it, you know you have something, and when you spend it, you know you spent it. Nobody looks at a bar of gold and says, "eh, there's plenty more where that came from." Nobody treats gold the way we treat a Tuesday.

That is what I mean when I call a day golden. Not that it is glamorous. Most days are not glamorous. Most days are dishes and traffic and email and somebody in your house needing something from you at exactly the wrong moment. What I mean is that the day itself, the raw material of it, is rare. It is limited. There is a fixed number of them and none of us know the number.

If somebody handed you a bar of gold every morning, you would not leave it on the counter. You would not let somebody steal it out of your pocket. You would keep track of it. You would spend some of it on purpose and save some of it on purpose, and by the end of the day you would be able to say where it went. That is the level of attention I am asking you to bring to a day.

You do not have to squeeze every second. That is a different book, and it is a book that eventually makes people miserable. I am not telling you to optimize the day. I am telling you to notice it. Big difference. The person who optimizes the day is trying to squeeze more juice out of a fruit. The person who notices the day is remembering that the fruit is a gift, and that gifts do not need to be squeezed. Gifts need to be received.

The People Who Taught Me This

I did not always think this way. I want to be honest about that too. There was a stretch in my twenties where I moved through days like they were a hallway I was trying to get to the end of. I was in a hurry to be older, to be further along, to be somewhere other than where I was. If you had asked me on a Wednesday afternoon what I did that morning, I could not have told you. I was not present in my own life. I was pacing through it.

Two things changed that for me. The first was losing people. I do not want to make a whole thing of it in this chapter, and I will come back to some of it later in the book. But I lost people who did not get another 24, and I sat at their services, and I did the math on how many hours I had spent complaining about things that had not happened yet, and I was ashamed. Not of the grief. Of the waste. All those hours I had let slide by while I was somewhere in my head instead of in my life.

The second thing was watching older folks who had it figured out. My grandmother's generation. Church mothers. The old men in the barbershop who had lived through actual, real hard things and still walked in on a Saturday morning talking about how good the coffee was. They knew what a day was worth. They had learned it the long way. When they said good morning to you, they meant it. When they asked how you were doing, they were listening for the answer. Their attention was not divided the way mine was. They were where their feet were.

You could feel it around them. That is what I want you to know. When somebody genuinely values the day they are in, other people can feel it. It does not require a speech. It shows up in how they hold a conversation. It shows up in whether they check their phone while you are talking. It shows up in whether they hurry or whether they walk. The way a person spends a day writes itself all over them, and by the time they are seventy, you can read it from across the room.

I want to be one of the ones you can read from across the room. That is a real goal of mine. I hope, by the time you close this book, it is a real goal of yours too.

Before any of that, though, there was my father.

Delton Lyles gave the Army more than twenty five years of his life, and he retired a Sergeant First Class, and every one of those mornings started the same way. Feet on the floor before the sun had made up its mind. Coffee. Boots. A look out the window at whatever weather the day had brought, and then a nod at it, like the two of them had come to an understanding. I never once heard that man complain about a morning. Not in Germany, not in Arizona, not in Italy, not in the years after the uniform came off. He treated the day like it had been issued to him, and you do not complain about what you have been issued. You use it.

My mother, Phyllis Lyles, taught the same lesson from the other side of the house. She was the one who kept a family moving across an ocean and back with three kids and a set of orders, and she did it without ever letting a single morning turn into a funeral. She would tell us to get up, get dressed, and go see what the day had. Not what the day owed us. What it had. There is a whole philosophy hiding in that difference, and I did not understand it until I was grown.

Everything I have written in this chapter, I learned in that house first and confirmed everywhere else later.

The Day You Almost Missed

I want to tell you a small story before we close this chapter, because a story lands where an argument slides off.

A few years ago I was driving home from a place I had no business being tired at, but I was tired anyway. It was one of those late afternoons where the sun is not quite committed to going down yet, and you are not quite committed to anything else either. I was in that half-there driving that people who work too much know very well. Body in the car. Mind three days ahead. Eyes on the road but not really.

Somebody blew through a stop sign about thirty feet in front of me. I did not see them until they were already in the intersection. The car went by so close I could see the driver's profile. Young man. Phone in his hand. Not looking. I hit the brakes hard enough to hear my groceries redistribute themselves in the back seat. That was it. No collision. No sound. Just a long second where two lives brushed past each other close enough to know it, and neither of us stopped to talk about it, and he probably never even knew I was there.

I pulled over about a block later. I sat in the car with the engine off for a while. I did not cry. I did not pray in a big way. I just sat there. I remember looking at my hands on the steering wheel and noticing they were still shaking a little, and thinking, without any drama, that I had almost lost the rest of today.

The rest of today.

I want you to hear that phrase, because it changed something in me that had not changed in fifteen years of hearing my old Pastor talk about the alarm clock. Everybody I loved was still going to be alive tonight. Whatever I was going to eat for dinner, I was still going to eat. Whatever I was going to read before bed, I was still going to read. Whatever conversation I was going to have with the people in my house when I walked in the door, I was still going to have. I got to keep all of it. I did not get it back. It had never been taken. I just, for one long second, understood that it could have been.

I want to tell you what I did with the drive home after that, because it is the whole point of this chapter. I did not drive faster. I did not drive slower. I turned the radio off, which I never do, because I like something in the car. I rolled the window down, which I also almost never do because I am a climate control person. And I drove the last twelve minutes home paying attention to twelve minutes, in a way I do not usually pay attention to twelve minutes. The light coming through the trees on my street. The particular blue the sky gets right before it gives up on the day. The way the tires sound on that stretch of road. My hands on the wheel, not shaking anymore. My chest. My breath. The fact of being alive, in a body, in a Tuesday, on a road, going home.

That was one of the best twelve minutes of my whole year. Nothing happened in it. Nothing at all. I did not accomplish a single thing. I did not have a breakthrough. I did not get a text. I did not close a deal. And I would trade a hundred twelve-minute stretches from the rest of that year for the one I noticed on the drive home.

That is what a golden 24 is when you actually count it. It is not glamour. It is not achievement. It is the raw fact that you are here, in a body, in a day, that you almost did not get, and that everybody, at some point, does not get. The person on the other side of that stop sign did not know. Whoever he was on the way to see did not know he had almost not made it. Neither did whoever I was on the way to see.

I have thought about that drive a lot. Not the near miss. The twelve minutes. Because the twelve minutes are always there. The twelve minutes were always there. On the average Tuesday I drive home from work and I could not tell you a single thing about the drive because I was somewhere else in my head. The twelve minutes were golden the whole time. I was the one who was not counting.

You do not have to almost die to start counting. That is the good news of this chapter. You do not need a scare. You do not need a diagnosis. You do not need a funeral. Those things do the counting for you if you have never done it on your own, and every one of us will get one of those wake-ups eventually. But you do not have to wait. You can start counting today, on purpose, before the world hands you a reason.

Look up from this page for a second. Look around the room you are in. The chair you are sitting in was built by somebody. The light you are reading by is running through a wire somebody laid. The floor under your feet was walked on by somebody before you got there, and it will be walked on by somebody after you leave. Your breath, right now, is the ten thousand and something breath of the day, and you have not had to think about a single one of them. Your heart has been beating this whole chapter without asking you for a schedule. Some of the people who used to be in this world with you would give a great deal to have another one of these afternoons. And you are having one.

That is your golden 24. Not the version of it you are going to have once the raise comes in. Not the version of it you are going to have once you move. Not the version of it you are going to have when your body is thinner or your bank account is thicker. This version. The one you almost missed and did not.

Use it well.

What to Do with Today

I am not going to close this chapter with a checklist. That is not the voice of this book. But I do want to leave you with a few things to carry, because a chapter that only tells you what to think, and never tells you what to do, is a chapter that fades by lunch.

One. When you open your eyes tomorrow, take one honest second before you touch your phone. Say thank you, out loud or in your head, to whoever or whatever you say thank you to. If you do not say it to anyone, say it to yourself. Just do not skip the second. The second is the whole discipline.

Two. At some point in the middle of the day, when you catch yourself in a mood, ask yourself the question I ask myself. Is this the weather, or is this the day? If it is the weather, let it pass through. Weather passes. If it is the day, if you have actually let your whole day become a mood, take it back. You are allowed to. Nobody else is going to.

Three. Before you go to sleep, do not review the day like it is a performance. Do not grade yourself. Just name one thing you noticed. One conversation. One meal. One moment in the car with the window down. Give the day the courtesy of being remembered for something. That is how a day becomes gold instead of a blur.

You do not have to do all three every day. I do not do all three every day. But if you do any of them, on any given day, you will start to feel the change I am talking about. The day stops being a hallway. The day starts being a room. You are in it. You are here.

That is the whole first chapter. That is where the book begins, because that is where the life begins. Not with the big turn you are going to make next year. Not with the version of you that is coming after the promotion or the move or the healing. With this day. The one you are in. The one somebody today did not get.

One Thing This Week

Pick one morning this week and give the first sixty seconds of it away on purpose. No phone, no scroll, no headline. Just feet on the floor and one honest thank you said out loud in an empty room. Do it Monday. See what Tuesday feels like.

Use it well, Fam. There is a lot of book ahead of us. And before we can talk about anything else, we have to talk about the three rooms every one of us keeps walking between, whether we mean to or not. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. Turn the page and I will show you which one of them has the light on.