Monday, January 24, 2005
I used to be just like him.
I have a friend who comes from a wealthy and well-connected family. Through a set of circumstances beyond his control, he is far from home, and learning what's it's like to live paycheck to paycheck. He's surviving just fine, but part of him isn't adjusting. In his mind, he lives somehow sprawled with one foot in the past and one in the future. I don't mean planning and remembering, but living as if this time in his life is simply a bad dream from which he is waiting to awake. Even his friendships are affected. He says to me, "Oh, [ValancyJane], when I am out of here, you know what I will do for you? I will call my friends and they will do this and that for you. Back home, I would have been able to do this or that." He's trying to be my friend in the future, or to imagine our friendship in the past. Not now. And now is the only time in which a person can live. He has invested almost nothing is the life that he has. All his thoughts are devoted to the future or the past. And so, when circumstances change, he will leave this place, with only the memories of a sad half-life behind him. No memories of laughter, of friendships, or all the other free things that make life worth living.
Yesterday is dead. Tomorrow never comes. Everyday you wake, and have only today.
Where do you invest?


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