Your life is made of your days, and each day is a brick in the foundation of your success.
“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”
Abraham Lincoln
Life is how we look at it.
It can be an overwhelming task, all those months and years looming with all of the goals and dreams you wish to weave into them. And in this day and age, most people live in the future, live in anticipation, live in a constant state of getting ready, planning, thinking, to the point that following through is hard.
It’s easy to take life on a week, a month, a year at a time.
Yet life only comes at us daily. Life is only ever encompassed in this moment.
Today is the only day you ever have.
Today, with its allotment of time, is the only time you will ever have.
Today is the only material with which you can build your tomorrow, your future, and your dreams.
In the timeless words of Roy T. Bennett, we must live on 24-hours a day, not 365 days a year:
“You cannot draw on the future . . . You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow, it is kept from you. You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. It’s right use . . . is a matter of the highest urgency.”
There is a case for living in the future — to envision it, to plan it, to set your intentions — but there is also a case for living in each day as if it were its own little life. Because that’s what life is, in the end: a culmination of days.
How we live our individual days is, as Annie Dillard said, how we live our lives.
- If each day is treated poorly, it is a life treated poorly.
- If each day is a victory, even in some small way, life itself is a victory also.
Each and every day we can do something great, and though there are limits to what we can do in a single day, when each day builds on the last, when each new victory builds on the last one, we achieve more, and growth becomes an exponential curve.
Life Is Cumulative
The accumulation of each little day of practice, effort, focus, work, play, love, and learning forms the enormous construct of dreams, legacies, and world-change.
- Rome was not built in a day — but it was built one day at a time.
- Fortunes are rarely earned in a day — but they are earned one day at a time.
- Successful companies don’t appear overnight — they rise one day at a time.
- So, too, is a world-class life, the unique one that is right for you, built one day at a time.
So let us learn to focus on each day as it comes, and to focus more on the today than the tomorrow, rather than the other way around that has so many people living ineffectively in the future they are not actively building today. All of us can, as Sir William Osler once said, live in day-tight compartments.
We can do any hard task for a day, easy, yet when we imagine doing it for 365 days we tremble. So let us do it today. Always today. Tomorrow doesn’t exist. Yet. Like Benny Lim said in his article, there’s no better time to live than in the present, to live one day at a time.
And in living in these day-tight compartments, we live presently, we live with what really is, and take meaningful action.
Time is of the essence.
Why?
Because life is fleeting.
Because life is short.
Think of all those who have come before you — who were born, lived, and died, and are now dust. So too with us. We are all dust in the making, but what we do with our days is far greater than mere dust: with each day, we have an opportunity to weave our impact on the world.
So let us live today urgently. The great Roman philosopher, Seneca, once admonished his dear friend Lucilius to, “Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
He also said this:
“Life’s finest days, for us poor human beings, fly first. . . Every day as it comes should be welcomed and reduced forthwith into our own possession as if it were the finest day imaginable. What flies past has to be seized at.”
Life will fly past no matter what we do, and if we always look to the future, the present slips past — and the present is life itself. You must live, as Thomas Oppong wrote, as if today were your first day and your last.
As you go into this day today, seize it, and welcome it as if it were the finest, most wonderful day imaginable, an opportunity like no other — for it is.
Each and every day is a miniature life with which we weave the tapestry of eternity, and we can use that to our advantage by making each day its own little victory.
Its own little compartment.
Its own little life.
Its own little success story.
A life of victorious days is far better than a life of well-intended tomorrows, and is a victorious life indeed.