When John Steinbeck started writing his classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, he also began a diary to document his daily thoughts and progress. 

In it, you’ll find ups and downs, hope and despair, his highest hopes for the book’s success, and fears that his story wouldn’t sell at all. He wrote of quitting and dragging himself back to writing, determined to see the project to its end.

In the middle of it all, he wrote a sentence that would make a fine motto for us to hold close when the thing we want to accomplish isn’t moving in the direction we’d planned:  “Yesterday was a bust and I’m sorry… but I think today will be all right.” 

Isn’t that how we’d like to begin a morning after a day of frustration and failure? Today is not yesterday, neither is it tomorrow. Today is its very own day with its very own opportunities and challenges. Yesterday may have been great or it may have been “a bust,” but today is today and it’s okay to think it will be all right. 

Today’s Peace of Wisdom can be found in treating today as its very own.