When the Worst Day Becomes the Best: Getting Fired, Then Free

Key Takeaways

The worst day of a life and the best day of a life are sometimes the same day — you just cannot tell which one it is while you are standing in it. My own firing in 2000 took years to reveal its second face.
The precepts' opening words, "just for today," are built exactly for worst days: they do not ask you to see the bigger picture, only to not drown before tomorrow.
Reiki does not promise that bad things stop happening. What a settled practice changes is the speed at which you stop fighting what already happened — and that speed, over a life, changes everything.

Key Terms Explained

五戒 (Gokai) / The Five Precepts — Usui's daily principles, beginning "just for today: do not anger, do not worry."
今日だけは (Kyō dake wa) / "Just for Today" — The frame that shrinks every burden to a single day's size.
師範 (Shihan) / Master Teacher — A teacher in the traditional Usui lineage authorized to teach and attune others.

The Day the Floor Disappeared

I often tell people I "became independent" in 2000. It is a tidy phrase, and it is not exactly a lie — but the truth has sharper edges. I was let go from my company. There was no grand plan, no entrepreneurial awakening, no brave leap. The floor disappeared, and striking out on my own was simply the only direction left to walk.

At the time, it felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I want to be precise about that feeling, because from the outside, twenty-five years later, the story looks almost inspiring — and stories that look inspiring from the outside are usually stories that felt like drowning from the inside. I had a decade of salaried work behind me, an identity built on belonging to something, and suddenly a silence where a job used to be. Nobody handed me a lesson with the termination papers. The lesson took years to develop, like a photograph in slow chemicals.

Looking back now, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Both sentences are true. That is the strange arithmetic this article is about.

What the Worst Day Could Not Show Me

The view from inside the day

On the day itself, a fired person knows only three things: what ended, what is owed, and how frightened they are. What they cannot know — what is structurally impossible to know — is what the empty space will make room for. In my case, the space slowly filled with businesses I built, five books I wrote, even a stretch of Japanese television coverage. I list those not to boast but as evidence: none of it was visible, or even imaginable, from inside that first day. The worst day and the best day were the same day, and only one of them was visible at the time.

Why "just for today" fits catastrophe

This is where the practice earned my respect. The 五戒 (Gokai: the Five Precepts) open with 今日だけは (kyō dake wa: just for today) — do not anger, do not worry. I used to read that as gentle advice for ordinary mornings. A collapsed life teaches you its real engineering: on a day when the future has gone dark, "do not worry about the future" is impossible, but "do not worry for the rest of today" is barely, just barely, doable. The precepts never ask you to trust that everything happens for a reason. They ask you to survive today without feeding the fear, and then to do it again tomorrow. Enough of those days in a row, and the photograph has time to develop.

The businessman's clue

It matters to my story that I did not meet Reiki in a spiritual bookstore. The person who first told me about it was a businessman — someone getting real results in the real world, not a "spiritual" type at all. And when I began practicing, nothing dramatic happened either: after my first attunement I kept a simple twenty-minute daily routine for two weeks and, honestly, felt very little. I say both things plainly because they belong to this article's theme. The turn in my life did not arrive as lightning — not in the firing, not in the practice. Everything important arrived quietly, on a delay, disguised as nothing much.

Related: From Quick-Tempered to Calmer: What One of My Students Noticed After Level 1 explains this in detail.

What I Tell Students on Their Worst Days

When a student comes to me inside their own worst day — a job lost, a marriage ended, a diagnosis received — I do not tell them it will turn out to be a blessing. That sentence is both unknowable and, on the day itself, a little cruel. What I offer instead is smaller and more honest.

First: you cannot evaluate this day from inside it, so stop trying. The books are not closed. Second: the practice is not for making the pain meaningful; it is for keeping your hands steady while meaning takes its time. Twenty settled minutes, the precepts held for one day only, kindness to whoever is in front of you — none of it fixes anything, and all of it keeps you from breaking what is not yet finished forming. Third, and I say this rarely and carefully: in my experience, and in the lives of many I have taught, the worst day has a second face that only years can turn toward you. I cannot promise it. I can only report how often I have seen it.

FAQ

Q: Are you saying Reiki caused your life to improve after the firing? A: I make no such claim. What I can say honestly is that the practice changed how I carried the years while they improved — less feeding of fear, more steadiness in the day I was actually in. The precepts and the daily quiet were the frame; the work of rebuilding was still work.

Q: Isn't "the worst day was the best day" just survivorship bias? A: It can be, which is why I refuse to promise it to anyone. Not every disaster blooms. But the reverse error is just as real: concluding on the worst day that the story is over. The honest position is that the day cannot be judged from inside itself — and that position, unlike optimism, costs nothing to hold.

Q: What should I actually do on a day like that? A: Shrink the frame. Just for today, do not feed the anger; just for today, do not rehearse the future. Eat, walk, sleep, and if you have a practice, do it small — five minutes counts. The goal of a worst day is not insight. It is arriving at tomorrow intact.

Key Insights to Remember

Days do not come labeled. The worst day and the best day can share a date, and the label you write on it at sunset is a draft, not a verdict. Time edits.
"Just for today" is crisis engineering. The precepts scale a life that has become unbearable down to a size that can be carried — one day — and then repeat. Survival by installments is still survival.
Nothing dramatic is still something. Neither my firing's gift nor my practice's depth announced themselves early. If your practice, or your recovery, feels like "nothing much" right now, that is not evidence of failure. That is what the middle of a long story looks like.