W

May 22nd

TODAY   IS  THE DAY

“You    get what    you deserve.    Instead of  being   a   good    person  today,  you choose  instead to  become

one tomorrow.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS,   MEDITATIONS,    8.22

“I  don’t   complain    about   the lack    of  time    .   .   .   what    little  I   have    will    go  far enough. Today—this

day—will    achieve what    no  tomorrow    will    fail    to  speak   about.  I   will    lay siege   to  the gods    and

shake   up  the world.”

—SENECA,    MEDEA,  423–425

e almost always know what the right thing is. We know we should not get upset, that we shouldn’t
take this personally, that we should walk to the health food store instead of swinging by the drive-
through, that we need to sit down and focus for an hour. The tougher part is deciding to do it in a given
moment.
What stops us? The author Steven Pressfield calls this force The Resistance. As he put it in The War
of Art, “We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my symphony.’ Instead we say, ‘I’m going to
write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.’”
Today, not tomorrow, is the day that we can start to be good.