Look To This Day
“To everything there is a season, … A time to be born, … a time to die …”1 And, may we add, a time to live, and that time is NOW! “Look to this day,” is written in Sanskrit, “for it is life, the very life of life.” Too often we are not content with the moment and wish it to rush on. Too often we wish the present hour would pass so we could hurry to the next, and hope that it, too, will quickly pass.
Youth is a time for storing up great treasures of life, yet the young are always in a hurry to be older. That is not to say the future is not important and that we should not prepare for it, but today is the time to think about tomorrow. Age is a time for bene fitting from much experience, yet too many of the elderly, long for their youth and simply wait for time to pass.
It does little good to hurry through life if that’s all we’re doing. So much of life we spend wishing it away. At fourteen, we wish we were sixteen in order to drive; at sixteen, eighteen is our goal, so as to be out of high school; comes eighteen and college, and a desire to be married and have a family. When that day comes, it’s “Oh, if the children were grown, we’d have more time to do what we want.” After they are gone, and another wish that they were back, it’s hurry on to retirement. And finally, we reach retirement and suddenly realize we have been so busy hurrying through life, we’ve failed to plan for that day and don’t know what to do with it.
Cicero said: “For just as I approve of a young man in whom there is a touch of age, so approve of the old man in whom there is some of the flavor of youth.”2
Young ideas seem to defy both the past and the future and make a worthwhile today. “Old things are done away”3 says the song. The past is gone, and the future may be uncertain, but what we do have is today, and “Our great resource,” says Horatio W. Dresser, “is to ask what life is now, …”4
And to those who are younger, let’s not try to be old too soon. Time will pass no faster just because we want it to. But, if our thoughts are always just for tomorrow, then today will pass us by. So, whatever our age, wherever we are in life, today is the day to live and enjoy life. One of the greatest moments in our life might be today. Right now, today, this moment is what we have, and we would do well to “look to this day.”
1 Old Testament, Eccl. 1, 2
2Cicero, De Seneclut. Ch. xi, sec. 38
3Leroy J. Robertson, Oratorio: Old Things Are Done Away
4 Horatio Wi1lis Dresser (1866 -?)
March 05, 1972
Broadcast Number 2,215