Your life happens in a day. The only thing that really exists in a life is a day. If you aren’t present, you’re already half dead. There are no cumulative moments, there are only details, there are only days.
No feeling is final, but each moment is.
And we waste most of them.
Waste most of them buying clothes for another day, working toward goals that we never fully realize. Everything is a means to an elusive and untouchable end, everything is to make a plan for things that will inevitably be rocked off course anyway. We don’t schedule finding the loves of our lives. We don’t anticipate the day we’re going to die. We don’t know these things won’t happen tomorrow, or today, we just assume.
You won’t remember the days, you’ll remember a few moments within the days. The more you’re focused on a hypothetical someday, the more you’ll miss. The less of them you’ll end up with. The less you’ll realize you end with nothing, you just have what you have.
You decide how much that is by how present you choose to be. And yeah, you have a choice. Every second of every moment of every day of every month of every year of every life you choose. You’re choosing right now.
You don’t know that while you’re choosing to stare at your feet wondering and worrying about another issue that will fix itself in a little bit anyway, you’re missing the person who just crossed your literal (and metaphorical) path. You don’t know that this moment is your last moment. You don’t know that it’s not your mom’s or your dad’s or your best friend’s. You don’t know that this afternoon is the first time you make a tiny change that spirals into a revolution.
The point is that if you don’t do it today, you won’t do it ever. The point is that the things you most want can and should begin right now. Time does not change you, you change you. So long as your mindset is ‘wait for tomorrow,’ tomorrow will never come. Things do not get better or worse, your ability to perceive them a certain way does or doesn’t. Life does not change, you do, and as you do, you don’t just get ready for the inevitable, you bring it to light.
The point is that we are born in one day. We die in one day. We meet the loves of our lives in one day. Anything spectacular that’s going to happen is going to happen out of nowhere, unexpectedly, genuinely, perfectly, usually without your planning or messing it up. We get in our way more than anything else does.
All you really have are a succession of todays. Tomorrow is just an idea. It doesn’t exist.
Brianna Wiest works at Thought Catalog. Culled from Thought Catalog.
