What would it take to call a day “perfect”?

Hello. Lovely to see you. A day in the life just flashes by so quick. This got me ruminating on how a “perfect” day could look like. When life gets frenzied, it’s gratifying to slow down and think about an ideal day. You must’ve noticed the quotation marks around the word perfect. Generally it is done to emphasize the word. But here I am using it as a scare quote in a satirical sense. Oh, the irony! Life is endlessly ironic. Perfection doesn’t exist and it is in imperfection that you and I eke out a living. Nevertheless, we love a day when everything falls into place and we didn’t have to worry about anything. Who doesn’t dream for one often? Crafting a “perfect” day assuming we stay awake for 17 hours a day can change a typical day for the better.
Envisioning an average day in extreme detail gives clear focus. Start with the moment you wake up and how you would go from there. A “perfect” day changes over the time. My goals and priorities have shifted in the last decade. I’ve always cherished life in a metropolis. But now when I visualize an ideal day, I fancy life in a small town. Look for a headway from where you are to where you want to be. A year or two from now seems like the right length of time to reflect upon and endeavour to live the goals. Naturally it’s not possible to accomplish all goals in a particular frame of time. Some may take years and that’s acceptable because life’s not a rat race. But we all can continue working on what it would take to call a day “perfect”.
From the small spectrum of my life, I’ve learnt that most of us want connection, freedom, satisfaction, and peace in an ideal day. We all are different and use different ways to communicate in this exceptionally interconnected world. This means we often don’t understand each other. Have you feasibly went the extra mile for someone, only to be belittled? It’s because we overlook the signals being transmitted. In digital communication systems such as the smartphones there is a principle that engineers follow to accurately reproduce the the real-world signals in digital format, known as the sampling theorem. This theorem is accredited to Nyquist, Shannon, Whittaker and several others. The signals are sliced into samples at a particular frequency. Then the nearest amplitude values of the samples are derived, and encoded to regain the original signal. These samples aren’t ideal but when connected together they recreate something closer to the real-world scenes. For instance, the songs that we hear and the photos that we click are adequate. Correspondingly in the psychical world, we ought to sample the signals and connect the dots to understand the world. Sometimes all we can see is a scattered graph of random dots. Always trust your gut to connect better with folks around.
The next important thing we need is freedom. Don’t we all want autonomy over our “perfect” day? I find this true in the general run of things. I resist doing something when being told to do, in order to defend my autonomy. Unfortunately, life doesn’t allow autonomy most of the times. We must make compromises to sustain an unscathed life. The truth is, we deliberately chose to forgo our autonomy at some point. But I feel it’s noteworthy to recognise that you can react to your dwindling freedom in your own way. For instance, you can choose to do it or not to. We just need to have all bases covered.
Satisfaction follows closely in our row of demands in an ideal day. Real satisfaction comes from doing what we love, getting better at something, and reaching our goals. Assessing our satisfaction is a good indicator of how happy we are with life. Good friends can boost our satisfaction. Our family tree gives us a bump in satisfaction. Identifying our goals and pursuing them gives satisfaction and meaning in life. Even a minor success gives me much more satisfaction than a billion quid. Also people who read and learn are more content in a day. So keep your mind open and keep learning.
Finally, we need peace in a typical day. Many a time a day free from frustration and anxiety is hypothetical. Life can be just plain hard. As a mum, I dash through a day and wonder what happened to all the hours elapsed. So I pause and try to seek peace. Uncluttering the space around us and uncluttering our minds with a refreshing slow nature walk seems reasonable to me. Accept, let go and focus on the present. Occasionally escaping in a good book brings abundant contentment and sobriety.
To wrap it all up, discerning when to stay still, when to get moving, and when to seek directions can contribute positively to an ideal day. Also getting to know out our own selves can be far-reaching. That’s the tricky fragment of our life. This makes me reminisce a line from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Montgomery. It goes like this, “Which would you rather be if you had the choice – divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?” Well, I don’t know. I can never make up my mind on this. Can you?