Every Day’s Diamond

When we look at our lives, we usually assess them in weeks, months, and years, but yet, in truth, we are meant to focus on days.

Kabbalists teach that a person is given an exact amount of days to live. Within each day there is a spark of Light that one is meant to perfect. The totality of all the work that is done in any given day, from restricting anger to sharing, goes into the perfection of the spark of Light of that day.

In the Bible, people lived for hundreds of years, but then life expectancy dropped. The kabbalists explain this with a parable. There was once a King who owned a diamond mine. After extracting the diamonds, he would give thousands of them at a time to local craftsmen, whose job it was to clean and perfect the stones over several months’ time. The only problem was that they never completed the work. In fact, some of the diamonds came back damaged. Therefore, the King set up a new method by which he gave each craftsman a smaller amount and less time to get the job done.

The same happened with humanity. Initially, the Creator gave each person millions of sparks of Light, one corresponding to each day of life they were given. But although people lived for hundreds of years, they often did not perfect their sparks. In fact, they damaged them. Therefore, the Creator cut down the amount of sparks given to each person all at once.

We are not given 80, 100, or 120 years of life. We are given 29,200 days, 36,500 days, or 43,800 days, and within each one, we are meant to perfect a spark of Light. The spark we are meant to perfect today cannot be perfected tomorrow, just as the spark we could have perfected yesterday cannot be perfected today. Each day has its own unique work relating to a specific aspect of soul that needs purification and elevation.

The Kabbalists teach that at the end of every day, as we go to sleep, if we have perfected our spark, it is sent up into our spiritual bank where it remains to protect us and to give us Light and blessings. When a person succeeds in this work, often the Creator will give him even more sparks, which, of course, equals more days, months, and years of life. Naturally, the opposite holds true as well.

The most important understanding from all this is that we do not live weeks, months, and years; we live day by day. The work we have to accomplish today cannot be accomplished tomorrow.

This week, awaken within your consciousness an appreciation for the power and tremendous gift of every day. When you internalize this understanding, even if days do not start off the way you had hoped, you will not write them off and push things into tomorrow. You will realize that what you need to accomplish today you can only accomplish today, and know that as you are perfecting and sending up the sparks, you are not only creating an amazing bank of Light that flows down to you, but you are also earning more days and more sparks to perfect.