Surprises #002

A single day can change a life

As we stumble into the bathroom every morning, we already know pretty well what we’re going to do that day: what we’ll have for breakfast, how we’ll get to the office, what we’ll have to do there. We might already know what we’ll have for lunch, and how our afternoon will play out. We might already feel exactly how we’ll feel when we come back right here in the evening, into the same room we’re about to leave as we go to work.

There is a beautiful ABBA song that perfectly captures that feeling, in all its dread and inevitability: The Day Before You Came. It goes like this:

I must have left my house at eight, because I always do
My train, I'm certain, left the station just when it was due
I must have read the morning paper going into town
And having gotten through the editorial, no doubt I must have frowned

And so on, describing a full day, from waking up to going to bed. Note the “I must have”. The narrator is not recalling the day. She’s not referring to memory. Rather, she’s guessing what she must have done on that day — simply because that’s what she is doing every day. One could argue that there is no life at all in such a life — doing the same thing every day, from morning to night, and then again and again, each day the same as the previous one, forever.

But then, we know that something will happen. Because the song keeps repeating this one line: “The day before you came.” She goes to eat with her colleagues:

I must have gone to lunch at half past twelve or so
The usual place, the usual bunch
And still on top of this I'm pretty sure it must have rained
The day before you came

And so it goes. The days are all the same, but only those days “before you came.” At some point, though, things change. You came, and everything changes. We never learn how things worked out after that other person came. But the whole song points towards that future, which is really the present of the narrator as she thinks back — to how everything was before. We don’t know how things will change, but we know that they will never be the same again.

But here’s the thing: She didn’t know that the change would happen. Up until the last moment of falling asleep at the end of that day, the narrator is firmly caught up in her daily routine, in the prison of that endless repetition:

And turning out the light
I must have yawned and cuddled up for yet another night
And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain
The day before you came.

She does not know it. She does not suspect it. But things are about to change forever. That one day of eternal recurrence, it will never occur again. Because the next day will be the first day after you came.

This song reminds us that our lives always carry within them the possibility of change. Even if we don’t know it, even if we don’t expect it, even if we do nothing to bring that change about. It’s not the narrator’s action that brings the change about, that lets her escape from her prison. It is, if you will, an act of God, a blessing that had not been earned, like every blessing. Even in the deepest winter, there is the certainty of spring. And even when our lives look their most stuck, their least promising, there is one dawn after another, one morning after another, one day after another — and each one is a new chance, a new promise, a new seed for life.

As we go into this new morning, let’s keep our eyes open for that seed of change, that unearned grace, that blessing that will breathe new life into our existence. As long as there’s a dawn, and as long as we listen to its promise, there is the hope of a new life.