Marking experiences this way is one key to happiness, said Dr. Now that I was looking for them, I caught them before they became memories. I no longer had to battle my nostalgia for ownership of my experiences. Staying up talking in a living room until too late at night or going for a weekend run through a park in the sunshine felt as wonderful as I had hoped it would.ĭesignating a regular night as a best night helped me claim that moment. Mundane experiences felt special when I marked them as such. Even if it felt ridiculous, this effort to make the ordinary feel extraordinary usually worked. I wondered, could I find a way to know when the best days were coming and really feel them as they happened? So I tried declaring a best day in advance. Unmarked by ceremony and undocumented for posterity, they streamed together in my mind as a blur. The problem with these best days was they went by without me realizing how special they were. I rarely had any photos at all of the best days. The polished moments that ended up on Instagram weren’t what I remembered at the end of the year, either. New Year’s Eve is useless Thanksgiving ends up being memorable not for the meal but for the next-day deliberations over how many ways you can eat a leftover turkey. The planned punctuations to life - holidays, job promotions, family milestones - often disappoint. Staggering home with a Christmas tree so big, it barely fit through the door.
That time we were going to miss the train so we sprinted to the point of near collapse - and made it. They were marked by the ordinary: a long conversation with a friend when I realized I wasn’t the only one who felt the way I did. But more often, the real best days in hindsight weren’t the obvious ones. Sometimes they were the days we expected.
On New Year’s Eves when I was in my late 20s, I would ask my friends to reflect on our best days of the year, the times when we had the most fun, felt the most grateful or were happiest.
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