Dawning instead of morning

It’s been a really tough week for me. I feel as if I laid myself on the line on a couple of different matters, and got burnt pretty badly as a result. I don’t handle those situations very well. Maybe it’s because I wear my heart on my sleeve to too much of an extent. A lot of it is because I saw how my father operated. It was always personal even if it was business, and that’s how I feel I approach life as well. Some of us learn from our parents mistakes, while most of us are doomed to repeat them.

And so as I was laying in bed before starting my day today, I got to thinking about how to change something without losing myself. I don’t want to lose my passion, but I need to channel my energy better when I feel as if I’ve been cut down. In my mind I realized the biggest problem that I face is that I constantly mourn the inability to succeed in the given situation which leaves me in a funk. I just don’t accept the mantra that you can’t win them all because I think I can.

My mind really started to wander, and I got to looking out through our new curtains. I could see the day starting; hear the sounds of the construction crews working outside at the Mint. The sun was fighting through what was left of a cloudy cover. And I really saw the dawn of a new day for the first time in a long, long time. I felt a real joy in being embraced by the sun as it reached out over the City. And I realized that what I need to change about my life is to quit worrying about the mourning, and start focusing on the dawn.

What then is the actual change? My challenge to myself, the path that I must walk down to grow as an individual, an engineer, a friend, a brother, a son, is to take on each day a new dawn. It’s a Sisyphian feat for sure in that while everyone else takes on another morning, I’m hoping to experience a new dawn. In the cliche sense, it could be as simple as a new street that I’ve never visited before, or an old challenge that I’ve been avoiding. But in the short term, for me, it’s going to be simply meeting the sun to make a more complete, full day of each day.

In the end of this experiment, I want to understand one simple construct. Why is it that we begin each day with a morning as opposed to a dawning, and how can I improve myself by just switching that simple bit?

Let the fun begin.