Give the Day a Chance

By: Damien J. Branch | Sunday, July 25th 2026 | 7:30 PM EST

Some habits do not feel like habits until you realize they have been making decisions for you.

My father used to catch me outside in the morning, I would wake up, step through the door and light up before I had done much of anything else. Before breakfast. Before work. Before I had checked in with myself long enough to know what kind of day I was actually having.

He would look at me, shake his head and say: “Son, you don’t even give the day a chance.” I would laugh. At the time, I thought it was just one of those lines fathers repeat because they know it gets a reaction out of you. I did not hear it as wisdom. I did not feel judged by it. It was simply part of our routine. He would say the line, I would laugh, we would both keep moving, what I did not understand was that he was planting something.

He was not trying to control me. He was not demanding that I stop. He was not delivering some long speech about what I should or should not be doing with my life.

He was asking a much simpler question: Before you change the way the day feels, why not find out what the day actually is? It took me more than twenty years to understand him.

When enjoyment quietly becomes maintenance

I am not going to rewrite my history and pretend there was never anything enjoyable about smoking. There were good memories connected to it. There were friendships, conversations, laughter, food and entire seasons of my life wrapped around those moments. When I was younger, it did not feel like a problem. It felt like the move.

Everybody around me was doing it.

There was a sense of freedom in it, especially when we were not supposed to be doing it. It felt exciting. It felt social. It felt like we were getting away with something. Somewhere along the way, the experience changed, it stopped being about the moment and started becoming about the next time, you finish, and before long you are thinking about when you will do it again. You begin planning around it. You make sure you have enough. You notice when you are running low.

Eventually, you have to ask yourself an uncomfortable question: Am I still enjoying this, or am I simply maintaining it? That question matters because the reward can disappear while the routine remains, you may no longer be holding onto pleasure, you may only be holding onto repetition, repetition is powerful because it can make almost anything feel normal. Something can be part of your day for years and still no longer belong in your life.

You stop asking whether you want to do it, you simply do it, that is when a habit can stop feeling like a habit and start acting like a manager. It manages your time, it decides when you are ready. It influences what version of you shows up next. My father could see something I could not see yet. He was not only saying that the habit might be bad.

He was reminding me that the day might be good.

I was not giving myself the opportunity to find out.

I need my whole brain

The honest reason I stopped was not because someone forced me to.

I did not get in trouble. I did not run out. Nobody gave me an ultimatum.

I looked around at everything I am trying to build and realized that I need my whole brain.

Not most of it, not whatever part of it is available after the fog begins to clear, all of it.

I am building Word Forward. I am growing Branch Brand. I am rebuilding The Gamerhood. I am writing, planning, recording, editing and trying to turn ideas into work that can genuinely help people. I also have a family depending on me.

There is a new baby on the way. I have children already watching everything I do. They learn more from the way I live than they ever will from the things I tell them.

My wife went back to school while I was recovering from a serious injury. She kept moving and graduated with honors while both of us were still figuring life out.

I have too much responsibility and too much vision to keep willingly showing up below my full capacity. That realization forced me to confront the example I was setting for my children.

They have seen the routine, they have seen me roll up. They have watched me step outside. They recognize the smell even if they do not fully understand what it means.

That started to bother me. I do not want a habit to feel normal to them before they are old enough to understand what it can become.

This is not an anti-smoking message

This is not me telling grown people what they should do. That is not the point.

Smoking was my thing, everyone has a thing. For some people, it is the phones. They open their eyes and allow everyone else’s thoughts into their minds before they have heard one thought of their own. For some, it is negativity. They wake up already convinced that the day will disappoint them. For others, it is remaining in a situation they have clearly outgrown because leaving would require them to show up fully somewhere new. The object may change, the behavior may change, but the question underneath it remains the same: What are you reaching for before you even let the day begin?

What are you using to tell the day how it should feel before the day has had a chance to show you what it is? That was the real question inside my father’s joke, it was not only about what I was doing. It was about what I was not allowing myself to experience.

So I Let the day begin

This morning, I walked outside. Same door, Same air, Same world waiting on the other side. I stood there for a moment without rushing to change how I felt, I let the day begin, my father would have liked that. Not because fathers always have the right answers. Not because he was right about everything. Probably because he planted a seed more than twenty years ago that finally found the right ground to grow in.

That may be one of the strangest things about losing someone.

Sometimes their words continue growing after they are no longer here to explain them.

This reflection is based on:

Episode 21 of the Word Forward Podcast, “Give the Day a Chance.”

⬆️ Click to Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube.