Tomorrow Is Only An Imaginary, Theoretical, Statistical, Probability
Today and only Today is real. Today is all we’ve got so we need to do it right. No regrets.
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
A Fact Came Into Focus
I was driving home from an ordinary, everyday errand when suddenly an idea struck me as if I had awaked from a half-conscious daze. It was a thought, a Truth, that I’ve implicitly known for a long time but only in an abstract intellectual way, like having an old cup in your kitchen cabinet that you’ve glanced past for years then, for no particular reason, you look at it closely and realize that it’s a priceless antiquity.
On this particular day two separate ideas were bouncing around in different parts of my brain and the revelation occurred when they unexpectedly crashed into each other with hypergolic results.
The First Idea
On the surface I was half-thinking about the birthday dinner that I was going to cook that evening for my girlfriend and then segued to thoughts of our planned trip in a few weeks to Southern California.
As that daydream was crawling idly through my brain I made a left turn toward my friend Norbert’s old house, and, unbidden, thoughts of him popped into my head.
The Second Thought
Funny, decent, happy, generous, smart, talented — a super-great guy — Norbert had migrated from a job as a newspaper staff photographer into a professional freelancer whose work appeared in the London Financial Times, Der Speigel and several other major publications.
In his late fifties, six feet four, in excellent shape, with excellent doctors and great medical insurance, one afternoon while talking to his mother Norbert made a little sound and fell over. He was dead by the time he hit the floor. Massive heart attack.
Fiction Is Not Like Reality
I love crime shows, but, unlike the real world, they always let you know when someone is going to die. The music changes, the camera angles realign. Perhaps a shadow or a pair of feet stealthily appear.
“OK, he’s a dead man,” you mutter to your partner on the couch next to you.
The clueless husband happily tells his shrew-like, faithless, cheating wife, “Oh, I stopped by the broker’s office and signed the papers for the new life insurance policy.” An ominous chord sounds and you know he’s going to be found messily dead before the next commercial break.
Unlike TV, Real Life Does Not Give Us Any Warnings
In that instant when I saw Norbert’s former house I realized with absolute certainty that real life isn’t like that. There is no swell of music, no warning tones, no sly glances from the other players on our personal stage. We never get a clue when our personal film is about to run out.
In my head a kaleidoscope was running — flashing images of dear friends who suddenly and without the slightest warning whatsoever disappeared from my life — Jim, to all of us forever Big Jim, who had just taken his seat next to his wife at a Broadway performance of Rent and then made the slightest little gasp, closed his eyes and was, poof, gone.
Hayford, my friend of over forty years who, while experiencing some kind of bursting emotional aneurysm, grabbed up his revolver, put one or more bullets in his wife’s head as she lay sleeping in their bed, then, later when he saw the police cruiser pull into his driveway put another slug into his own.
Gone. Just instantly, unpredictably, horribly gone.
As I drove down that street, the fact of their completely unpredicted and unpredictable deaths merged in my brain with my humdrum plans for what my girlfriend and I were going to be doing a few weeks from now and the two thoughts exploded into the inescapable realization that there is, in fact, no Tomorrow.
The Future Does Not Exist
Tomorrow may or may not ever come, and if it does, that’s all we’ll have — Tomorrow, just that one day. Everything else is merely a plan, a possibility, a hope, a dream, a fiction an illusion until it actually arrives, like Schrödinger’s cat which is neither here nor there, good nor bad, alive nor dead until the instant when we open the box.
Tomorrow is just a probability. We will probably be here tomorrow. To a slightly lower mathematical degree we will probably be here a month from now or a year from now, but none of that is certain.
And once Tomorrow does arrive we cannot travel back to Today to change or repair or fix what we did, or often more importantly, what we didn’t do Today.
The inescapable fact is that Tomorrow is not real. For all of us, Today is all we’ve got. That dinner tonight, that TV show we may happen to watch, that angry word or kind one that slips past our lips Today all constitute our only reality.
So, that was the reality I could no longer ignore — Tomorrow is only an imaginary, theoretical, statistical, probability.
Today Is All We’ve Got To Do Life The Right Way
We actually, really, live our lives just one day at a time.
Today, this minute, this hour, this day is all we’ve really got so
- We need to do it right,
- Make it count.
- No regrets.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
