Recently, I watched About Time, a movie about a man who can travel back in time and change details to help improve his future. The movie, starring Domhnall Gleeson as Tim and Rachel McAdams as Mary, shows their journey as they fall in love and start a life together.

Throughout the movie, Tim uses his ability to travel in time to help fix his mistakes and help his family members fix theirs. His father, who also shares the ability to travel back in time, tells Tim the secret to living, he says to live each day once as you would any normal day, then go back again to the start of that day, live it all over again, but this time focus on the beauty and the moments that make life better, do not focus on the bad, focus on the good.

This got me thinking. What if people were able to live each day twice? Would we use the second day to enjoy our lives or would we still focus on the bad?

There is always so much going on in people’s lives, problems they don’t know how to fix, heartaches they cannot help heal. But there is also so much going on around us that might just be able to put a smile on our faces, even for a split second.

If we were all able to live our days twice, I like to think that we would make the second time around better. I hope we would all focus on making it a good day, a day that keeps a smile on our faces as we climb into our beds.

I like to think that we would learn to appreciate our lives a little more; we would create a world that focuses on the little things that make us feel alive. The things that make us laugh and smile and think to ourselves “wow, I love my life”.

For some reason though, perhaps just because I know how we are as humans, I could see it going the other way. I could see us viewing the ability to live each day twice as a burden. It would become something that we would get sick of after awhile, especially on days that are particularly horrible. We would get sick of having to do days all over again. We would try to get through the day faster, rather than opening our eyes and seeing all the magnificent things there are around us. We would live the first day as normal and live the second like a day we have been dreading for weeks.

That is the sad thing about humans; we do not realize how easy it is to make a day better. We all are guilty of this; it is easy to complain about our daily lives.

In the movie, Tim gets to the point where he does not have to relive each day, he just lives the first day like he has already lived it once and now is going back to live it again and appreciate it. He gets to the point where he sees the beauty in life, sees the little things that make a day just that much better, and he lives his life with this perspective.

Now obviously, this is just a movie. But the concept is wonderful. It is hard to live life by ignoring the troubles and trying to only focus on the good things, sometimes the good things are harder to find. But there is a way that we can all live life by focusing on the good more often, just little by little. And it is hard, but we have to ability to live happy, beautiful lives. Here is my challenge to you: every time something bothers you, you have a negative thought, or you think to yourself how much you hate everything, just take a minute and rethink things. Look around you and find one good thing that makes you smile or that makes your day a little brighter. Just those small things can take a terrible day and make it a bit better.