Tegbir Kaur Week 11 - Due Tomorrow? DO Tomorrow!

It’s 9:59 PM. A small bead of sweat trickles down your forehead. It’s now or never. Fingers shaking, you type one last word and hit Submit, your half-finished assignment no longer your problem, at least, not until it is graded…but you obviously can’t think that far ahead. 

Exhibit A? Twenty four hours ago, when you could have been working on the assignment, you chose to test your reading speed with a random video on YouTube (about 800 wpm). You doom-scrolled and discover a podcast critiquing the economic, social, and political conditions that shape the world of Harry Potter (Critical Magic Theory). Twenty four hours ago it was all about “living in the moment.” “I’ll be wiser tomorrow,” you said. “I’ll do it tomorrow.” 

But what if tomorrow never came? 

Granted, if you were dead, the half-completed assignment would be the least of your worries (unless you were Hermione Granger—then you’d be turning in your grave), but you get my point.

How many things do we put off until tomorrow even when we cannot know for certain if there ever will be a “tomorrow” for us? And is that truly hope or simply arrogance?

It’s easy to get caught up in our lives and forget that there is a ticking time bomb. The most important “due date”—our very last deadline. Swept up in the daily buzz of our lives, we can’t imagine that we will all once experiencing a last, dying breath—extremely suddenly or maybe with months to prepare.

If we are fortunate enough to experience old age, maybe this concept will begin to feel more real. Maybe only the gray hairs and the tired knees can force us to think of each heart beat as potential to do something, to be someone. Because, by then, we see the deadline looming overhead. But we’re too exhausted, weak, too beat by life to change anything.

The possibilities of what we do with each day given to us are endless. But we can’t keep pushing them away, thinking they’ll turn up again tomorrow. They probably will, of course. But one day they won’t.

So why don’t we save ourselves the misery, the regret of knowing there is too much we wanted to accomplish but never did? Obviously, it is not always that simple—sometimes enjoying the small things in life gives you an inner satisfaction that school or work could never. So maybe today is about trying to learn that balance. The balance between making the changes you want to make in the world and simply living.

It doesn’t have to be about using every second of each day dedicated to work, work, and more work. It should be about living today so that we can go to sleep feeling proud of who we were today.

Especially in adolescence, today is almost always about thinking of the future. Thinking of tomorrow. But we forget that tomorrow can’t happen without today. That today is the only assurance we have—the rest is up to the universe. Meaning that today is the most powerful; every today is the most important day of our lives.