The Wisdom of Groundhog Day

by Sandra Nelson
copyright 2004’

This spring I saw an old friend in a coffee shop. Many years had passed since we last spoke. Children had grown, marriages ended, and homes relocated. We spoke for hours, finding similarities and differences as we exchanged stories. Our lives had taken similar paths with families, children, even our health. Both of us live with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

However, it is there that our stories differ. I jokingly referred to our health as fun. My friend became serious and even angry about my comment and went on a rant about how hard and unfair life is and how she had been mistreated at every turn by everyone she knew.

Obviously, forgetting I live with the same illness, she continued to educate me about her experience. Amidst all her anger, she shared a few examples that served to validate some of my own experience and helped me to understand why I do some things differently since becoming ill. She talked about the way each day must be reinvented when one has fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and compared it to the movie “Groundhog Day.” In that analogy, I saw a nugget of truth. Out of all her anger came a defining comment; “…every day is like Groundhog Day.” It was true for me as well, but only for the first two years of my illness. Sitting in my back yard I had a defining moment that started me on the path to better health.

She had given me a lot to think about that day. We both have the same illness and have experienced similar struggles because of it; the same illness with one exception, the way we ‘think’ about it. I don’t know from one day to the next if I will be well enough to do what I want, and I still get frustrated at my limitations, but I won’t let that stop me.

She talked about facing the same restrictions day after day, week after week. Pain, loss of physical strength, and memory loss make even the simplest daily tasks often impossible. The normal life of learning new things, going places, and meeting people is suddenly stopped, and replaced by days filled with pain, confusion, and regret.

I couldn’t get our conversation out of my head. For the week that followed, someone kept whispering, “Groundhog Day,” in my ear until I finally paid attention. Once I did, the rest of the message flooded in. In the movie, Bill Murray’s character, Phil, the weatherman has the uncanny experience of living the same day, Groundhog Day, over and over. Each morning he got up, talked to the same people in the Bed & Breakfast where he stayed, saw the same people on the street, and had the same conversations.

As with most of us, Phil’s normal life was filled with limiting thoughts and behaviors. It took the daily rewind of Groundhog Day to get his attention. The defining moment came when he asked someone, “Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.”