Today is Groundhog Day. By the time you read this it will no longer be so—though perhaps it will still feel like it. Does today feel too much like yesterday?

On this official day of the (ground) hog, I offer up some remedies for all of the sameness.

In fact, this could be my shortest essay of all time—if I just spill the beans. My remedy, in short, is this: Don't do it the same way every time. Shall I stop here? Or would you like to read on?

Good, I was hoping you would say that! As I was saying…

The hog may tell us the winter will be longer. We’ll have lots of time to sit around, moping about how cold it is and wondering if spring will ever come again. Time to contemplate, and perhaps overcomplicate, simple things like how to quit doing it like we have always done it.

There are, of course, many reasons for our own personal groundhog days. And we don't have to wait until the first Monday in February to recognize the day—and the rut. Like Christmas in July, or every day being a Rosé Day, any day could be a silent dedication to Mr. Hog, the one that grinds your today into the dust gathered from all of your yesterdays. This is not fertile soil for your dreams to grow in, my friend.

Why must we worship that hog that lives in the ground? Why do we do our days the same way, every day? Because we are lazy. We like to follow the same old dog (hog) path from here to there but want it to be a superhighway. We are unimaginative, unproductive, not enlightened. Stuck, afraid, addicted to our life drugs of choice, only we forgot long ago who or why those choices were made. Yes, I am all of those things today. Just like I was yesterday.

Today I am going to try to break away from my hog. Who lives in the ground. Whose shadow has not been seen. I will do something different. And I’m not even being made to do so. In fact, to tell you the truth, it's all a bit of a hassle. Shall I reconsider? No! Onward!

Now that I am committed, what shall I do differently? Maybe I can take another route to work. There are a lot of different ways to get to practically anywhere you want to go. What about wearing some other clothes? I could dress up like I am going somewhere else (using a new route, of course), and people who never notice me might make some pithy comment like, "You look different today! Do you have job interview?" Alas, I do not. I have had this same job forever. But isn't it nice that someone thinks I might be capable of being hired to do a new job?

It's lunch time now. I absolutely cannot have that same tuna sandwich and Baked Lays chips I have every single blessed day. Here's where this “do things different" schtick gets tricky.

What shall I have for lunch??? I am momentarily paralyzed. Can’t I just bail on this one change and have my usual tunafish sandwich? It's guaranteed to be delicious. Just like it was yesterday.

But to compensate for my lack of change courage, I park in a different space at the sandwich shop. I open my car door and look down at the pavement at the cigarette butts of the man who parks his pickup in this very same space every day, gets a ham and cheese and then sits in his truck afterward for a smoke.

I see him here, every day, arriving 20 minutes before I do, so his smoke session ends at the exact time that I finish my tuna sandwich.

But not today. I am doing things differently—I arrived early and took his parking spot. There are exactly 17 ciggy butts lying on the pavement, no doubt one more than the day before. It feels random, but soon I realize that there is no randomness to it at all, and that I have just done something that has upset the status and stasis, the flow, perhaps even the very structure of the universe, just because I dared to do something different. A disturbance in The Force. Ham and cheese man will be forced to smoke his cigarette in another space, to discard his butt onto a new, uncharted, unsullied spot. By changing my habits I may have also changed the trajectory of the future. Maybe ham and cheese doesn’t feel comfortable having his smoke at the new parking space, so he forgoes smoking for the day. Maybe he discovers that he no longer really likes smoking; maybe he should quit. And he does; thus narrowly avoiding lung cancer 17 years later. Several pigeons are spared a terrible death when they do not have any more ciggy butts to eat from the parking lot pavement; and I discover that there are other parking spaces in this lot, some even shaded unlike the one I have used before. And there is a better route from the sandwich shop back to the office, more scenic, quicker, fewer potholes.

Who knew???

I’ve discovered a secret. Today is not actually like yesterday, unless we choose to make it so. Maybe I even liked yesterday. But perhaps I will like today even better. Tomorrow? We will just have to see.

And it's kinda a lot of work to think about doing something different than what I did today. Based on my comfort zone, so far, I will probably enjoy today more than that tomorrow thing. Why change when you’ve finally got it all figured out?

Somewhere, near a small town in Pennsylvania that nobody quite knows where it is, a groundhog is turning over in its grave, even though it’s not actually dead. It's just sleeping until the time comes to wake up next Groundhog Day, and confirm once again, that everything is still the same as it was yesterday. Seeing and knowing that, the groundhog can safely go back to sleep for another year. Or maybe he really is just dead.

Groundhog Day...Again?

In fact, this could be my shortest essay of all time—if I just spill the beans. My remedy, in short, is this: Don't do it the same way every time. Shall I stop here? Or would you like to read on?

What shall I have for lunch??? I am momentarily paralyzed. Can’t I just bail on this one change and have my usual tunafish sandwich? It's guaranteed to be delicious. Just like it was yesterday.

I’ve discovered a secret. Today is not actually like yesterday, unless we choose to make it so. Maybe I even liked yesterday. But perhaps I will like today even better. Tomorrow? We will just have to see.