What should I do Today

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Dalai Lama had once put it succinctly (tongue-in-cheek) that there is only one day in your lives that we can do something and that day is ‘today’. While elucidating the benefits of this one line wisdom to a bunch of sophomores at a B School in Edinburgh I did drop in my two bits by adding that we all must do something ‘today’. A flowery haired girl yet to shed her baby fat around the middle, bright eyed promptly asked: what should I do today. I stared into her face for a moment longer than necessary trying to glimpse any mischief therein, but she held my gaze and I detected nothing but sincerity of purpose. Next I glanced at my audience and told them what I am about to unfold in this post. What should I do today! And this is not a question but a self-projecting statement that is puzzling at best and perplexing at its worst.

If you have been plagued too by this puzzle then you are not alone. I have a simple and practical solution to it. Just sit down with a piece of blank paper and pen or pencil. Not with a mobile phone or anything electronic. Let’s keep this simple and basic. Thereafter ponder a bit and ask yourself with utmost honesty: if today was the last day of life, what all things I would like to do in the next 24 hours. Then pen down the things one by one as a list. Permit a maximum of ten minutes to accomplish this task. Any longer you end up wasting precious time in too much thought experimenting rather than concrete solid action. Then read the list carefully and start doing the things that you can do right away, immediately. It is that simple. That’s exactly what you should be doing today.

 Yet you must remember that you may not be able to accomplish them all or perhaps not even one of the things to its conclusion but what is important is to begin and not to tarry any longer since your 24 hrs clock in running backwards every second. Now when today becomes yesterday and you realize that you are still alive, then simply continue the work that you had started yesterday and hadn’t reached its conclusion. As each day becomes today and then yesterday, you will realize that much of what you are doing today is what you started yesterday, some of which you might complete today and then you can jump to the next one in your list.

 Life is temporal and fickle, and even our today is a constant transition from past, present to future and reverse since soon our future becomes our present and then our past. Our actions can be unidirectional though if we continue to progress from one step to the next. Life can extinguish any moment, within today, which it must one day. No one dies yesterday or tomorrow. And there’s no escape from that once you are born. Because we are also born in today. So for me, each morning when I wake up and realize that I didn’t die in my sleep I quickly bring up my list and see what I must do today. Either to continue what I started yesterday or to begin the next thing in my list for today. That list is very important and the most important is to follow up on that list one action after another.

 What should I do today! You have the answer, just act upon them now. This is not to say that I follow my own advice verbatim, since there are days when I just lie beneath the sun under the shadows of some mighty snow covered mountains and gaze at the blue sky dotted with cottony clouds and ask myself with a deep sigh of satisfaction: why must life be so good and I be the luckiest person in the world. Because there are those days when I just wish if I were to die one day then such a day as today is perfect.

 

 

 

 

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