When you’re on vacation, you do everything you can to savor each minute of it. Every delicious meal, beautiful sight, warm ray of sunshine, or undisturbed nap is so precious because eventually they’ll all be gone and you’ll be somewhere else. But what is the difference between that and our everyday life? This perspective that every moment is valuable, I believe, is actually our natural state and meant to be carried into our everyday lives. Yet, somehow we’ve succumbed to a culture of hustle and grind that has driven us into a strange, yet popular madness – it’s so subtle that we can’t see it. The result is problematic and it drives us into depression and anxiety that can ironically kill. We’ve forgotten that tomorrow isn’t a promise, but a hope, and that our time today is really all we have. To accept the truth that the boundary between this day and tomorrow is literally a single breath is beautiful and freeing – to stop worrying about tomorrow because it doesn’t belong to us.
We don’t like to think about it, but we’re temporary creatures. It’s a defining trait of our existence that one day we simply won’t be here. Yet, most people seem to do everything they can to avoid thinking about the inevitable, reluctant to accept that there might be a powerful meaning in embracing this truth. We don’t realize that accepting our potential end does not need to be done in morbid despair, but that to do so is actually a liberation. Freed from a race to the superficial goals of buying and buying and buying more things, the acceptance of our limited time readjusts our priorities. It helps us to see what is really important. If tomorrow might never come, what would matter today? That reflection is life changing.
This is not just an abstract exercise. The real life effect of focusing on today as a gift and not a given is gratitude. Gratitude will make you wealthy. Seeing our day from this perspective, we stop looking at it as mundane life and begin to see it more as a vacation. Eventually this day will be gone and we’ll be somewhere else, possibly not on this Earth. So why not savor every sip of coffee as if it were our last? Hold someone we love a little longer in our next embrace as if that moment could be goodbye. Maybe even let go of old grievances as if by tomorrow they wouldn’t be there. This outlook that we’re just travelers who are here for a moment and then gone forces us to examine our concerns, and so much simply ceases to matter anymore. But then, the few things that do still matter are so dear because they simply won’t last, and so they need to be savored while they do.
Every person is reminded throughout their life of their beautiful fragility and it’s a mercy that we don’t always see it. Our temporal nature is very real. Many of us have been nearly hit by cars, choked on food, nearly tripped down a staircase, or gone through many other things that could have easily ended us. We don’t need to wait for death to finally come before we’re able understand its importance. Just as birth is the gift of all possibility, death is the conclusion – they create a balance between ambition and caution, respectively. Ironically, putting it off would be a missed opportunity to live a full life. It’s the worst kind of procrastination. How many decisions would we make differently if we only acknowledge that tomorrow is literally not in our hands – how much more humble would we be? Perhaps our time and effort would be invested more carefully and more lovingly into what we pursue.
Today is everything we own, let’s recognize it. Let’s watch the intensity of what annoys drop, and the coinciding appreciation for the riches already in our lives rise way up. Let’s be travelers who make every effort to be present so that we can fill our days with an admiration and gratitude for even the smallest favors we’ve been given in this life. And if we’re honored to experience tomorrow, then let’s be grateful for the gifts it brings.
