How to Live a Perfect Day

What’s your idea of the perfect day?

Pause. I really want you to think about this. If you weren’t bound by anything, what would your perfect day be?

When I was younger I used to have these incredible dreams. I’d suddenly get discovered and become a famous rock star or actor, even though I have no idea how to sing or play the guitar. Or I’d give a speech so rousing that they’d whisk me off to Davos, and I’d give the most popular TED Talk in the world.

I feel like I should still have dreams like that. They’re exciting and powerful, and they’re the kind of accomplishments we’re supposed to want. But my dreams have recently taken on a different character. Mostly I want to have great days, those days when I walk down the street and feel like the world had a soapy film on it and had just been thoroughly cleaned, or days with my family when I get a truly remarkable hug, even if I’ve had that hug countless times before.

Richard Curtis should be an expert on the perfect day. He wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually. This is a man who made movies about the Prime Minister dancing through 10 Downing Street, and about a heartbroken writer flying to Portugal to propose to a woman who doesn’t speak his language. But in a 2013 interview, he said his old romantic comedies were really about longing for first love, and they only told half the story. Someone leaves their family, finds love, and gets married, and the movie ends there. The second half is the regular life that comes after, with kids and aging parents.

Curtis realized this when he was sitting at lunch with his friend Simon, who lives in New Mexico and doesn’t see him often. They got onto whether they were happy, and Curtis surprised himself by admitting he wasn’t, really. So they tried to work out what a perfect day would be. Curtis said he used to picture flying to Monte Carlo, a date with Grace Kelly, winning a million pounds, and a text saying he’d been nominated for an Oscar. Now he hated all of it. “It’s too scary and strangers…” he said. Then he noticed that the day they were having was the perfect one. He’d taken his kids to school that morning, he was having lunch with his best friend, and he’d be home for dinner with his family.

That lunch is what prompted him to write About Time (currently on Netflix), a sci-fi romantic comedy. It’s about a man who can pick any day and go back in time until it’s perfect. What would he do with that power? Would he try to impress the perfect girl? At first he does, a lot like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Then the hero, and to some extent the audience, gets the ultimate anticlimax. Tim’s father, played by Bill Nighy, says the best thing to do with this power is to live every day twice, once the way he normally would, with all its nervous tension, and a second time to notice what was good about it. By the end Tim stops going back, because he’s learned to live each day the second way the first time.

Curtis stopped directing. He hasn’t directed a movie since About Time came out in 2013. He told the South China Morning Post that directing is only mildly enjoyable, and that “if I could spend 1,000 days on something, I’d rather spend it with my family.”

As for me, I can relax, knowing that a man who could have done all these crazy, fantastic things realizes he doesn’t need to.

Further Reading

Dara Horn does something similar in her book Eternal Life. The main character can never die. While that seems like a wonderful thing, it’s actually a curse, and she spends most of the book figuring out how to die, even as her granddaughter is working on a research team searching for how to live forever.