Member-only story
How Is Your Day?
The Underappreciated Depth and Meaning of a Seemingly Superficial Question
Nearly every day, when my wife and I sit down to eat dinner, I try to ask — over an endlessly chatting 4 year-old and a loudly eating 1 year-old — how was your day? It’s a question that many of us ask every day of both people we know and care about, as well as relative strangers. But do we ever stop to ponder the depth and meaning of that question? If we did, would it change how and when we ask it, and what we mean by it?
We may think that there are just 24 hours in a day, and we’re all just living that same 24 hours as the sun rises, sets, and rises again. We can fall into viewing the Earth’s rotation as one objective pre-defined period of time that is the same for everyone. But when we really think about it, nothing could be further from the truth.
There are currently somewhere around 7.6 billion people living on this planet. And each one of them wakes up every day, and begins another journey into the relative unknown of their lives. That’s 7.6 billion encounters with accomplishment, disappointment, loss, elation, love, romance, depression, isolation, fear, joy, worry, doubt, laughter, tears, hope, hard work, exhaustion, elation, and so on. That’s 7.6 billion separate, slightly different views of the sun rising and setting. It’s 7.6…
