The Tomorrow We Planned for Yesterday

standing on the edge

Every morning we wake up with two choices. We can go back to sleep and dream about an undefined future, or we can get up and start living our dreams.

Only this new morning, this present moment, offers us amazing new choices in vivid colour, energized with possibility. We know in our heart and mind that all the ingredients for achieving our life goals, the power to innovate and express our deepest creativity, rests in this embryonic ‘now’ moment, and nowhere else.

Through living in a state of wakeful attentiveness, we understand that the present is all we really have to work with. It is all there is to manifest our life. Embracing the ‘now’, we are inspired and activated by the power of its potentiality.

Why then do we continually shape our present by looking through the lens of the past?

Yesterday, All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away...

Yesterday seems to be such a safe place. It is something completed, something we know and believe in. It may have hurt us, but there is nothing unpredictable about it.

The past can seem like such a welcome distraction from the full-on immediacy of today, with all its complexity, pressures and risk. In many ways, it can feel less stressful to return to a familiar moment, a time where we know the outcome, and are reassured by our self-imposed boundaries.

Nostalgia has a certain, limited power to motivate and energize, but it is woven from memory – of action or inaction – rather than from action itself. Yesterday too often becomes a rose-coloured lens through which we examine our options, weigh our choices and ultimately make decisions for the now.

Because our colour spectrum is limited, however, the tendency is to make the same kind of decision over and over again. But in doing this, our progress is severely limited.

Today is the Tomorrow We Planned for Yesterday

When today – which is really yesterday’s ‘tomorrow’ – arrives, it can be so much more comfortable to put off the commitments, delay following through on the promises we made to ourselves and to others. Most people have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we're often thinking about what we did before, pondering how we could have done it better, and spending our precious time analyzing previous interpretations, bygone conclusions.

In doing this, even faulty assumptions can easily become the confining box from which our today has to operate. Thoughts and things remain unchanged, and the future simply becomes a continuation, a straight-line manifestation of the past.

There is another way to live, another way to function. We could use the lessons from yesterday to motivate and empower change and to move ahead. Having learned, we could expand our understanding and consciousness, taking things to an even higher level as we move forward, living not in the past or the future, but in the present moment.

Our choice is clear: We can choose to dwell in the past, imagine the future that is not ours to predict, or we can live in the now. But we will only do this when we really do realize that now is all we have.

‘Whether it’s the best of times, or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.’
– Art Buchwald



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