The other night I had the following dream. Some people were hosting a group to discuss the God book with me. As we drove to their house, we noticed some neighbors who were coming to join the meeting. To my surprise (actually, shock), when Abigail and I arrived, there was a whole crowd there, lined up in rows on lawn chairs in the front yard. They were facing a porch to be used as a speaking platform. 

I had not planned to give a speech, and had nothing prepared, but I said to Abigail, “I think I had better get up there and give a talk.” “Well, YE-AH!” she replied. So I got up on the porch and looked at the crowd. I said “SOMEBODY has done a great job of getting this crowd together,” and I saw a guy toward the back beam at the compliment. Chatting for a moment with someone in the front row, I said, apropos of I know not what, “Today is tomorrow.” And then I said, “That wouldn’t be a bad name for a speech.” So I said to the crowd, “I did not have a speech prepared but talking with this person up front, I realized that ‘Today is tomorrow.’” I am not usually glib but this time I launched on an elaborated discussion of the ways in which today prepares for tomorrow – enacts it in advance, you might say – and what happens tomorrow is that today’s preparation plays out. And today is, in fact, every tomorrow, and so on in that vein. “This isn’t bad,” I thought, “though it is a lot like a Hallmark card version of a lifemanship presentation.” Then the scene faded. 

Superficial or not, I was probably onto something. I have long felt that I should live every day as if the sum of my life as a whole depended on what I do now and here. My thought is not so much that what you do today sets the terms of what you are able to do tomorrow, though that is true. But my thought is more about the meaning of life, as if the highest ideal I am able to live at this moment casts a meaning over the whole of my life. Whether that is wisdom or just a facsimile of it, I can’t know. I occupy the thought, and can’t see over its rim. Maybe you can.