I believe it was Annie Dillard who said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” and it has me wondering- how do I currently spend my days? How should I spend my days? And if we’re thinking about spending our days, should we be thinking about “saving” our days, too?

With Daylight Saving (or Savings if that’s your flavor) Time starting early tomorrow morning in many places, the clock will “fall back” an hour to help “save” daylight, but it has me pondering the (admittedly tangential) idea of saving vs. spending our days.

“Saving” can mean several different things. It can mean holding onto something to spend or use it later. It can mean rescuing someone or something from disaster. It can mean preventing a certain outcome. Saving the day usually connotes some heroic feat, but what if we thought about it in a less aggrandizing way, and more as preventing the day from being wasted?

I don’t know about you, but if I don’t start my morning with the perfect, peaceful ritual and plenty of sleep, I feel crabby and useless the rest of the day. It’s easy to get halfway through the day feeling exhausted and unmotivated, and at that point, to mentally decide just to write it off, and resolve to start over and try again tomorrow.

Lately I’m realizing, though, how sad that is! I don’t want to waste half my days just because they got off to a rocky start! If my mood and contributions to life and society depend solely on the first 90 minutes of my day going perfectly according to plan, then I am most assuredly going to have more bad days than good days, and I certainly do not want to live like that.

So what would it take to “save” the day, halfway through? Or even later- in the evening? Or even right before bed?

Well, if how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, then we have to ask ourselves in the hard moments- how do I want to spend my life?

Do I want to spend it being grumpy? Complaining? Laying on the couch and scrolling? Nope.

Then I can’t spend this whole day doing that, either. And here’s the thing- while it’s easy to feel super guilty if you’ve already wasted, say, hours doing those things, and it can be tempting to feel hopeless to turn the ship around at that point, you can always choose to spend five minutes making a better choice. Just one. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Can I put my phone down and read a real book for five minutes instead? Probably. Can I get up off the couch and just wipe the counters down, even if I ignore the dirty dishes in the sink? That seems doable. Can I close Instagram and choose one friend to text and check in on instead? Now we’re talking.

It’s ok to give ourselves the grace to save the day in small chunks at a time, and not to need the perfect agenda or Herculean energy levels to make small adjustments to better align our lives with the people we want to be and the things we want to do with our time.

If I were growing flowers and decided that the first time I forgot to water them meant I’d intentionally give up and never water them again, these poor mums (and every other plant we own) would be long dead by now.

But if I sat there every time I thought about watering them and simply felt helpless to get up and do it, they’d reach the same fate. Only by noticing and taking the easiest first step of deciding to do something a little differently could I save the flowers, one remembered watering at a time.

So the next time you feel tired and stuck, what’s one little dream or relationship or goal you can water? What’s a five minute task you can rally for? Who in your life might really love an unexpected text from you today?

I hope you can bust through the fog and save even just a little of your day today.

You got this, wildflowers!