Tomorrow

How many times have we said to ourselves that we must write a letter to so-and-so.

Perhaps it is to be a thank you note or just a letter to say that we are still alive and hope that they, too, are alive and well.

But we do not. At the last minute we are unsure of what to write so we put it off. Tomorrow is a better day for writing such letters.

Then it never gets written. Perhaps our friend dies and we are riddled with personal torment.

“Oh, how I wish that I had written while they were still alive. There are so many things that I wanted to tell them but now it is too late. They are gone,” our guilt laden conscience will tell us.

Procrastination is, we are often told, the thief of time.

It is also the thief of our well-being; it is the root of our dissatisfaction with ourselves.

We constantly put off things until a later time knowing, in our hearts, that they will never be done.

It may not be a letter; it might be a personal visit or making something for somebody.

“I’ll do that for you—promise,” you might say.

A promise broken.

It may not mean much to you but for the intended recipient it might mean so very much.

There will be times when the possibility of doing something that we need to do is removed from our ability to carry it out by an external occurrence. An accident or sudden large bill; maybe an illness in the family.

How do we explain to the person to whom we made the promise that it is not to be? Any excuse, or reason, will sound hollow. We are backing out.

Disappointment.

Failure. Our own.

So it is with writing a story.

We all have stories in our heads. We promise ourselves that we will write them down. The ideas are bursting inside our heads, the epiphany has bloomed, our pens are poised ready to strike.

The first words elude us.

How to start?

Never mind. Write the second part. We can come back to the first part later.

It’s that first sentence. We cannot write it.

Giving up smoking? Same thing. We promise ourselves that we will stop. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a good day to stop smoking. We just cannot quite justify doing it today.

Justifying another cigarette is easy; it is the same with any addiction.

The trick is to give up the first cigarette of the day.

I went from three packs a day to zero overnight. Now? I have no desire to smoke at all. Sixty a day for hundreds of years to nothing. No problem.

Now I am addicted to this machine. I am addicted to forming words into sentences into chapters into stories.

It is just writing letters that is the problem.

Perhaps tomorrow...