Tomorrow

It may not come. If it comes, it will bring disappointments, including the disappointment of reliving everything that disappoints you about today.

Something will anger you. Someone will annoy or offend you. You will find yourself struggling to start a task you had hoped to undertake with enthusiasm, or you will start one but fail to complete it satisfactorily. You will fall short of an expectation you had set for yourself, or forget to do something you had considered important. You will receive an unwelcome message or fail to receive an anticipated one. An idea or realization of significance to your life will evade your grasp or slip from your memory.

You will feel tangibly burdened by oppressive regulations from forces far beyond your control. You will grit your teeth at the awareness that all the people you care about are also oppressed by those same regulations or others like them, and you will experience an overwhelming sense of impotence in the face of that awareness.

You will suddenly remember something from your past that frustrates you, saddens you, shames you, or outrages you, and then wonder whether you will ever be free of that memory — concluding at last that you will never be free of it. 

You will feel pain — a stomachache after breakfast, a headache in the afternoon, a stiff back, a shortness of breath, a pang of guilt, a knot of worry, or a gnawing fear — or, perhaps worse, you will pass hours of the day with no discernible feeling at all. A hundred things you ought to observe or learn or enjoy will pass you by in your distraction. You will experience the tenuousness or transience of most relationships, and the boring irrelevance of most human interaction. You will feel tired and unable to focus on things you know you ought to do, or think, or care about. You will leave important matters unresolved. 

And tomorrow, if it comes at all, promises only more days like itself (though each one slightly less likely to arrive than the last) as its “tomorrows.” This is the context in which everything worth living for will be found. There can be no thought or conversation or excitement or discovery except as glistening anomalies noticed and snatched from within the surrounding mire of disappointment, oppression, frustration, and weariness. There is no avoiding this context, except by artificially masking it (as most people seek to do), which would necessarily entail veiling all the possible worth of the day as well.