An adage in education is the following: every day is a new day.

I have things happen in my classroom every day, as a new, first-year teacher in a very rough and challenging environment, that try me and mentally break me down every day. Whether it's one of my students bullying another or a student cursing me out or a student somehow thinking it's okay to put his hands on me, I teach a challenging group of students who have been through a lot of trauma. I go home every day feeling defeated, feeling like I did the kids a disservice in some way or another, from the lesson that went like a dumpster fire or the insurmountable amount of tasks to catch up on at work.

But every day is a new day. I'm able to press forward the next day without the hope in pipe dreams: I know that things don't often magically get better overnight, and that every day, I'm getting better as a teacher and champion for my kids. It's a new day every day, and that means a fresh start. I allow myself to apologize for the things that didn't go so well the day before I start the new day.

Like everything, that adage doesn't just apply to education. It applies to everything in life, whether it's the ability to wake up in the morning and be on time to work, whether it's the ability to actually make it to work, and whether it's the ability to simply sleep or put food on the plate.

Every day being a new day doesn't mean that we should expect miracles. Miracles are unlikely, but even the fact that miracles are unlikely means that we should open ourselves up to new possibilities. Go home every day and go to bed every day knowing that even the things that didn't work, that went disastrously, that a difficult conversation or bad risk you took, was a big learning experience.

Let us learn to proceed the next day with hope. There is no day that goes so great that everything was perfect. There is no day for us to be happy about everything, because sometimes the biggest motivator for change is dissatisfaction.

But learning that every day is a new day allows us to rest after a hard day's work, reflect and study the things that ground us, whether it is our faith, rituals, or routines, and finally just chill out.

Sometimes I look back at the days in my life where it felt like the world was crashing down, that life wouldn't go on, that everything in my world was going to end. Yet that wasn't the case. Life never ended then, and new chapters started, but life always, always, went on.

We don't get the wisdom of our present hardships, traumas, and situations until we can reflect in hindsight. And that's okay, because we weren't meant to process everything immediately in the first place.

Of first-year teachers, a Medium writer I greatly respect, Dan Moore, told us that as first-year teachers, we are going to suck, especially compared to veteran teachers, especially compared to second-year versions of our teacher selves.

"This year, it doesn't matter if you suck," Dan wrote. "What matters is that you not give up."

Internalizing the fact that every day, we hit the reset button, will help us to not give up, no matter how challenging what we do is. And even if yesterday went horribly, if the worlds we live in came crashing down, let us have woken up today not distract or deter us from showing up for ourselves, for our families and friends, for people who depend on us.

Every day is a new day. So let's press forward putting the problems and challenges of yesterday behind.