Tomorrow Never Knows

When I was very young, I had a lot of fears.

One of them was that it was possible that each day I lived was kind of a self contained universe, that according to that premise, I might well go to sleep and wake up with no memory of the previous day or what had happened or even who I was. What if, I irrationally reasoned, I awoke to a whole new world, with new parents a new school, a whole new identity. I'm not sure exactly where this fear came from. I've learned since that I've had OCD for most of my life, and this particular fear may have just been a permutation of that overall pathology. I've had a lot of irrational fears in my time and this was really no more severe (though perhaps a bit more creative) than any of the others.

I've been thinking about this notion of each day being a lifetime or world unto itself lately, though. Since my mom died, my life has changed in incalculable ways, and I've had a lot of moments where I was so frantically unsure of what would happen the next day. Legal, moral, financial, psychological, spiritual (and every combination therein) questions plagued me and as I was truly alone for the first time in my life, I had no way to gauge whether or not I was making the right decisions. It seemed like every other day some new crisis would blindside me, and whatever confidence I had in my ability to make good decisions was swiftly undermined, if not destroyed. I often found myself in a state of near panic, wanting help or vindication of some kind but knowing instinctively that there was no one left who could, or in reality, should, offer that. The person who had always done that for me was gone, and whatever confidence I could muster was going to have to come from within from that point on.

I don't know how good of a job I've done. Decisions have been made, some good, some bad no doubt. One thing I'm learning is that it takes a long time to really judge whether particular decisions are good or bad; unforseen consequences don't usually pop up right away, and usually, as many positive ones manifest as do negative ones, further affecting my ability to judge accurately. I guess ultimately I have to fall back on that old quote from Stephen King's "The Dead Zone" that I seem to use so often; it goes something like "we all do our best and that has to be good enough. And if it's not, it has to do." It sounds obvious, but truth to tell, it's one of the most freeing things I've ever read. As far as I can tell, we're all just kind of feeling our way in the dark on this planet, and about the best we can really ever do is TRY to do the right thing at the time and hope that in the end, it's not only truly right but that it's right not just for the immediate future, but for all time.

Maybe my childhood fear was telling me something after all. Maybe each successive day IS in fact it's own reality in a way. Maybe each day we live is what we have to concentrate on because it's all we can ultimately effect or control. The past is behind us, taking with it all of our previous decisions and actions, so for good or ill, it's gone. We can and should remember it, but our inability to do anything further about it makes it forever out of our reach. And the future, by its very nature, is always going to be one step ahead of us, completely beyond our grasp. What we do have is right here and now; this day, this immediate decision.

I worry about what President Obama would call a "whole host" of things; illness, poverty, isolation, morality, responsibility, identity, the basic "unknown" quality of life and it's mysteries. I have a very hard time navigating areas of ambiguity and uncertainty. I have no idea whatsover where I'll be one year from now, or in what condition. But I guess the frightening and ultimately freeing truth is that no one does, and that no matter what the outcome of present crisises, the unknown quality of life is eternal. Maybe I don't have cancer today, for instance, but a year from now I might. Truly, we don't have much more than today.

That's why it's our responsibility to make it our own, to make of it as much as we can and to try to be content with that. Death waits for us all, whether tomorrow or fifty years from now. It's inevitability should ideally give urgence and meaning to what we do in the oh so short time we are on this Earth.

Starting...today.