Just For Today – the magic card…
There’s a pocket-sized folded white card that has helped millions of people around the world to positively transform their lives and benefit everyone around them too.
For a few decades, tens of thousands recovering alcoholics and addicts have read this tiny piece of paper known as the Just For Today card. It has helped them live an exceptionally peaceful and content life. Now, increasingly, many people outside of the recovery world are discovering its immense benefits too.
The Just For Today card is nine wonderfully written suggestions for living on a daily basis. If put into somebody’s life each day, they make for an outstanding way to live. Originally found at AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings and then many other Twelve Steps group meetings, this card is indispensable to a great many people. It’s so valuable that many carry the card with them wherever they go – after reading it first thing in the morning as well as any time they might need some calm or inspiration.
A wonderful way to live
My introduction to the Just For Today card came when I sought help from people in recovery who’d had similar troubles to me that led to my rock bottom. One of those people advised me to meditate every morning, write a gratitude list every evening and read it as soon as I woke up, and to read through the Just For Today card each morning.
Then it was suggested that I put what it said into my daily life. Within just a few days, I found it was an absolutely wonderful way to live. Now I read it most mornings – as I have for more than 21 years. It is a simply beautiful design for living that comes naturally now. Around the world, there are tens of thousands who are reading it and living it every day too. Its benefits can be positively felt at home, in the workplace or college and throughout the local community.
A set of daily resolutions
First produced in 1978 by AA on a slim white card that folds in half to be around 7.5cm by 10cm, the Just For Today card has 336 words that are both beautiful and powerful. In fact, the Just For Today card’s words are moderately re-written from a column by journalist Frank Crane for the Boston Globe that was published in 1921.
This column contained a set of daily resolutions “to make when you awake in the morning,” wrote Crane. “They are Just for One Day. Think of them not as a life task but as a day’s work.” What is successfully proven is that if lived by on a daily basis, they will have a phenomenally positive effect for the person living them – and for everyone around them too.
The Just For Today card
Just for today I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once. I can do something for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt I had to keep it up for a lifetime.
Just for today I will be happy. Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Just for today I will adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires. I will take my “luck” as it comes, and fit myself to it.
Just for today I will try to strengthen my mind. I will study. I will learn something useful. I will not be a mental loafer. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration.
Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn, and not get found out; if anyone knows of it, it will not count. I will do at least two things I don’t want to do – just for exercise. I will not show anyone that my feelings are hurt; they may be hurt, but today I will not show it.
Just for today I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress becomingly, keep my voice low, be courteous, and criticize not one bit. I won’t find fault with anything, nor try to improve or regulate anybody but myself.
Just for today I will have a programme. I may not follow it exactly, but I will have it. I will save myself from two pests: hurry and indecision.
Just for today I will have a quiet half hour all by myself and relax. During this half hour, sometime, I will try to get a better perspective of my life.
Just for today I will be unafraid. Especially I will not be afraid to notice what is beautiful and to believe that as I give to the world, so the world will give to me.
My latest article for Soltalk magazine.
