It’s Always Tomorrow

I was chatting with someone yesterday – just a regular conversation on Facebook – and at some point we ended up taking about a random topic, which was how often we practice sports. I asked him, half joking, half not, when he intended to start going to the gym, like some other friends do. His answer was half a joke, half not: ‘Tomorrow’, he said. And then something happened, something that reminded me why I like talking to people, and especially to people I don’t usually talk (and by talking I also mean chatting).

You find a lot about a person by simply chatting with them. But, perhaps most importantly, you may also find something about you. Something they point out, something that you discover through the conversation, some ideas that you may not find in any other place, or from anyone else. You may find inspiration. Inspiration for deeper thoughts, for deeper discussions, or for a new blog post. So chatting is interesting and useful in the same time, at least for me; and it’s nice to find inspiration in places you didn’t expect to, and from people you barely know – and that’s the fun part when you’re a blogger, right?

I responded without really thinking about it, half laughing, half serious: ‘It’s always tomorrow’. And then I started talking about something else, until he made a remark a few chat lines below, that made me stop. It was the kind of remark I was referring above, the kind of remark that makes you realise you have a starting point for something deeper, the kind of remark that basically makes you think. Cause he said ‘”It’s always tomorrow”… nice ‘.

And I stopped for a few seconds, speechless. I always appreciate when someone is quoting me, it makes my words feel valued, and that’s a nice feeling, to know that someone actually remembers what you’ve said. And even if there have only been a couple seconds between you saying that remark and the other person repeating it, it still matters – perhaps even more. The way he said it, with quotation marks and everything, plus the ‘nice’ adjective, made me realise that indeed it was a nice quote, even if the truth behind it is not that nice – it’s actually a little sad, I think. But I know it’s true, and I wonder what I meant by it… And there was only one way to find out – by writing this post.

We tend to plan everything. Our schedule, our meetings, our lives. We tend to prioritise tasks, to decide which ones are important and which ones can only mean procrastination. But we’re also quite good at running, and I don’t mean exercising (unfortunately), but running from certain tasks, postponing them until later, until tomorrow, until… never. Cause ‘tomorrow’ is just “a mystical land where 99 percent of all human productivity, motivation and achievement is stored.” (a nice quote I found online).

Will tomorrow be as expected, with all the plans you made the day before?… Are you going to be happy with the fact that you’ve already decided how tomorrow should look like? Are you going to be happy with the fact that you’ve spent ‘today’ thinking about ‘tomorrow’, instead of living the moment? Does tomorrow ever come, actually?

Cause If tomorrow never comes… Will she know how much I loved her? Rather than just assuming she’ll know, you’d better make sure she will. You’d better live in the present and do what you’ve postponed for tomorrow, today. Cause why not? You can’t postpone things forever, so why not getting started on them right now? I admit I need to learn how to live ‘now’, to stop making so many plans for tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and so on… Cause the truth is that you’re missing the present, if your mind is set in the future. And moreover, if tomorrow does come, you’ll have to do those tasks anyway – be them sports, homework, or just a simple thing such as telling someone you love them. And the more you postpone them, the less desire you’ll feel for actually doing them. Remarks such as ‘I’m not in the mood now, so I’ll leave it until tomorrow’ can be so tricky sometimes. Cause believe me, the next day you’ll most probably be even less in the mood for it. The only ‘good’ thing about postponing is that at some point, there’s a deadline when you really must do it, and then it’s done, and congrats, you’ve finally finished the plans you had for X days ago. But what if the deadline doesn’t really exist, and you keep postponing the task until, well, forever? What if you end up being fat because you’re too lazy to exercise, and now you don’t have time anymore? What if you miss the chance of telling what you feel, because you were too afraid, and you lied to yourself by trying to believe that ‘tomorrow’ was a better day? What if tomorrow never comes, and you miss all the chances you had today?…

It’s always tomorrow, but never today… says and old song I found by googling my own quote (cause why not googling your own words?). So stop living in the future, or else you may have regrets at some point, ‘tomorrow’, for not doing all the things when they were meant to, and for being too coward and/or lazy to confronting the present. Cause it’s always ‘tomorrow’, but is tomorrow ‘always’? We usually blame time for not being able to do things today, so we postpone them until tomorrow. But tomorrow is just another day, that will even change its name to ‘today’… Tomorrow is not an infinite period of time, tomorrow is not ‘always’ – unless you postpone it infinitely, which is, honestly, the worse thing you could do. Don’t leave until tomorrow what you could do today, at least not without a really good reason; pretend tomorrow doesn’t come – are you happy with the present, have you done everything that has to be done, today?…

Tomorrow may not be ‘always’, but now is. Now is the answer to the question “When…?” Cause if it’s not now, then it may be never. And you’ll regret not living in the present. If we’d all try to follow the last verse of the song, We’ll forget our tomorrow, and live for today, we’d be much happier. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point in the future, we’ll be glad we didn’t waste our time planning instead of actually doing the thing. But it’s hard, isn’t it?…

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow
You’re always a day away! 🙂