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Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence challenges us to step back and take stock of our lives.

For too many of us we fall into running on autopilot and to-do lists, losing sight of what brings us joy.

To create a day we are willing to live over and over is a matter of acting on our preferences and emotions.

In his book The Gay Science, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche presents the notion of eternal recurrence: If you were to live your life over and over for eternity, with all its joys, struggles, and tedium, could you accept it? Would that be a good-enough life? What is powerful about this question is that it forces you to step back and take stock of your everyday life—namely, is it good enough?

For all too many of us, we never have the time to step back and take a day’s pulse. But when I ask my clients to do precisely that, their everyday generally runs around a five—not a disastrous 1 nor an ecstatic 10. It’s not bad; it’s not great. It’s neutral, a shade under good-enough, because nothing bad happened. And if I ask what fills their lives, it’s, like for many of us,........

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