What Life Is Now
As we look toward the New Year, we could easily become overwhelmed at the challenges that lie ahead. If we are not careful, over concern with the future could cheat us out of the pleasures and joys of today. And today is the most valuable time we have. It is said in Sanskrit to “Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life.”1
Yet too often we are not content with the moment and wish it to rush on. Too often we wish the present year would pass so we could hurry to the next, only to 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. Now, the future is important, and we should prepare for it, but today is the time to think about tomorrow. Age is a time for benefitting 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 are now where we wished to be and don’t know what to do with it.
The past is gone and the future may be uncertain, but what we do have is today and the beginning of a New Year. “Our great resource,” says Horatio W. Dresser, “is to ask what life is now, … “2
To those who are younger, let’s not try to be old too soon. This year 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, this year, this day is the day to live and enjoy life. One of the greatest moments in our life might be today. Right now, this moment is what we have, and we would do well to “look to this day.”
Revised from the Spoken Word of March 12, 1972
1 Based on the Sanskrit
2Horatio Willis Dresser (1866 – ?)
December 31, 1972
Broadcast Number 2,259