Well, I don’t suppose it’s true that tomorrow never comes. If that happened we’d all be sorta stuck in a perpetual Groundhog’s Day scenario – say, haven’t we met, you know, today?
Disneyland of the late ‘60’s had The Carousel of Progress, a huge, revolving theater that brought you scenes of an exciting future life. The song that thrummed between the scenes told us “there’s a great big, beautiful tomorrow, waiting at the end of every day.”
At the end of this day, I’ve got to clean out the cat box – I hate cats – and do the dishes, and fix the pool pump. At the end of the day that follows this one – I won’t say tomorrow – I’ll have to fix the pool pump again, clean out the cat litter box – I hate cats – and catch up on the roughly 714,000 other little things that need doing every single day.
If, like me, you work a nine-to-five, those magic windows of sit down and think time, of play with the words time, of what-if time, well, they’re sort of like the windows of the apartment building across the street – you can look into them from here, but they are oh so hard to open.
Tomorrow is just like today, and will just the same as yesterday and the one that follows. Trudge, trudge, trudge right into the grave. Sigh.
Waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa
That’s the dinkey-toons answer. That’s the gee-I’d-like-to-be-a-writer-if-I-could-just-find-the-time answer. That, my dear writer friend, is the excuse.
The truth is that you’re a writer, and you know what that means. What time is it? Time to work, day in, day out.
Why are you changing the cat box – I hate cats – when you could be working? The dishes’ll get done, they always do, and the pool pump is a Sunday afternoon item. What’s the rush? Why put those mundane things ahead of your important, life-giving work?
Tomorrow comes when you make it come. It will be the best tomorrow you can imagine because you earned it – you worked hard and busted your knuckles to build it.
A tomorrow in which you are a passenger is just another day. The tomorrow that finds you creating, crafting, working – that’s the one to live for.
So, my literary friend, tomorrow doesn’t come. You have to bring it on.
John D Reinhart 