To Everyone Who Says ‘Someday’
There’s this amazing fact staring us all in the face every moment of every day, yet we hardly every think about it: each of us is living the greatest mystery of all time. Not a single one of the 7.3 billion of us knows the answers to some very basic questions, like, where are we from? What are we doing here? Where are we going after this? Did something or someone put us here? For any reason?
Like the Buddha once said, it’s like we’ve all been shot with an arrow and are slowly bleeding to death, but instead of trying to address our present condition, we’re asking irrelevant and detailed background questions, such as, “Who shot the arrow? What did that person look like? Where did he or she come from?”
In the same fashion, we go about our day-to-day lives crying about how we don’t love our jobs, making ourselves miserable because we think we “have” to do so many things, and worrying about pieces of paper that allow us to exchange our time and energy for things we’ll possess for the duration of our blip on the radar of the universe. Basically, concerning ourselves with a very small microcosm of existence — mundane, unimportant, microscopic trivialities.
Life is this incredible gift we’ve been given, and we repeatedly forget how wonderful, how miraculous, and how simple it really is (or can be) to be alive.
So why are we so scrupulous with money, an inanimate and technically infinite resource, and yet so frivolous with our time, the only thing we really have, which can expire at an undefined moment’s notice? Where do we muster up the arrogance to assume there will be more of a resource we do not own or distribute by our own free will? The idea of that alone is sheer lunacy. How dare you say, “Someday I’d like to be a writer” or “Someday I’ll travel the world” or “Someday I want to fall in love.” You’re not in charge of the future! So write, travel, and love. What are you waiting for?
Do what you want to do and what you need to do and what inspiration is calling you to do, just do not delay. The arrow has been shot, and you, my friend — and all of us — are bleeding to death. Don’t ask too many questions, don’t ponder the frivolous, don’t live in the microcosm, and don’t squander a single breath. Live, love, and rejoice.