If You Could Relive One Day From Your Past, Which Day Would It Be and Why?
Someone asked me this question on a slow evening, the kind of evening where the power had gone and I was sitting outside my compound in Benin City, listening to crickets negotiate with the darkness. I laughed at first, because it felt like the kind of question strangers ask at parties to seem deep. But then I actually sat with it, and it stopped being funny.
Which day would I relive?
I thought about the big days first, because that’s where the mind goes. The day I got into medical school. The day King David Properties closed its first deal without a single hitch, the client’s face soft with relief because for once, someone had told her the truth about a plot of land in Benin City. The day I stood in front of secondary school students during a Catch Them Young session and watched a boy who had said nothing for an hour finally raise his hand. Those days felt like candidates. They felt earned, photographable, worth reliving.
But if I’m honest, and this blog has never let me be anything else, the day I keep returning to isn’t one of the loud ones.
It’s an ordinary Tuesday from years back. Nothing newsworthy happened. I wasn’t chasing a deadline, wasn’t running between the hospital and a site inspection, wasn’t drafting an essay at 1 a.m. with Scripture open in one tab and land documents in another. I simply had time. I sat with my family, we ate together without anyone’s phone buzzing, and my mother told a story I’d heard before but somehow needed to hear again. I didn’t know, at the time, that I was in the middle of something I’d miss. That’s usually how it works. We rarely recognize the ordinary while we’re inside it.
I think that’s the real answer to this question, and maybe the real reason it unsettles people. We assume we’d relive our triumphs, but triumphs are self-contained. They already gave us what they had to give. What we actually long for is the unremarkable stretch of time when we were unguarded, present, and didn’t know yet that presence is a limited resource.
There’s a verse I return to often, from Ecclesiastes, about a time for every purpose under heaven. I used to read it as permission to compartmentalize, medicine in one box, business in another, ministry in a third. Now I read it differently. I think it’s a warning wrapped in comfort: every season passes, including the ones you don’t notice passing.
I won’t pretend I’ve mastered this. I still catch myself in the thick of a busy week, moving from ward rounds to a property inspection to a mentorship call, treating presence as something I’ll get around to once the schedule clears. It never clears. That’s the joke of adulthood nobody tells you at eighteen.
So if I could relive one day, I wouldn’t ask for a miracle or a milestone. I’d ask for that Tuesday, not to change anything in it, but to notice it properly this time. To put my phone down a little longer. To ask my mother one more question before the story ended. To sit in the ordinary and let it be enough.
Maybe that’s the real point of the question. Not to send us digging for our best day, but to remind us that the day we’re living right now might be someone’s answer someday, if only we’re paying attention while it’s still here.
If you’re reading this, I’ll ask you the same thing that was asked of me: which day would you relive, and what would you do differently, not to fix it, but to finally see it?