No Day But Today: Living Fully in the Present Moment

Wake-Up Call #27

I don’t remember how the card ended up on my kitchen table.

Something about the phrase caught me.

Beyond the import of the message.

Thoreau’s take on rugged individualism never landed with me. Competence and confidence sure. Self-assurance. Being able to take care of yourself. But, too often, the sentiment has been wielded as a weapon that cleaves and diminishes, rather than builds and unites. Leading to shame, exclusion, dominance, diminution, and disconnection.

Of course, we don’t want to live our lives entirely dependent on others. But, the reality of the human condition is that we come most fully alive as individuals when we honor and contribute to the simultaneous uplifting of the collective. And, for many, through various seasons of life, challenge, ability, and limitation, we simply cannot exist without community.

Thriving is a we thing, as much as a me thing.

Thoreau’s kitchen table invocation landed differently, though.

A call to embrace the here and now. Still, there was something else. Not just the idea, but the lyrical delivery, that stopped me.

The lines, it turns out, were pulled from Thorough’s April 24, 1859 journal entry.

A bigger chunk reads:

Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets.

Okay, more context. But there was something else.

Pouring over it, I kept feeling I’d seen it before.

But, not from Thoreau.

Then it dawned.

The phrasing was remarkably similar to lyrics from the song Another Day, penned by Jonathan Larson for his theatrical phenomenon, Rent, 135 years later.

Larson offered a similar call, but in the context of living through the dueling crises of AIDS and drugs that ravaged New York’s Village and Lower East Side in the early ‘90s.

I’d spent a fair bit of time there, then. Larson and I might have even shared passing moments, wandering through the same smattering of low-brow bars, and live music venues that seemed to adorn every alley. Back then, it was called Alphabet City. A grungy place, but also a neighborhood infused with grit and soul. People lived out loud in all the ways, good and bad.

The crack epidemic was on brutal display. Empty vials littered the streets. I remember catching up with a friend on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, a neighborhood hub. Hearing a commotion, I turned to see a man in his twenties, camped out with a small crew on the grass behind us. He screamed, then started pounding his partners chest, trying to revive her. She laid there, splayed out, nodding into overdose. Thankfully, he did. EMTs arrived soon after.

Horror, and love. Evisceration and salvation. The razor thin ledge between life and death. All there.

This was the world that served as the backdrop for the story that would become Rent.

Larson’s words from the song, Another Day…

There’s only us
There’s only this
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
No day but today

…haunted and inspired me.

The sentiment, language even, so close to Thoreau’s.

I was fortunate enough to see the original cast perform the show on Broadway, shortly after it took the New York City theater world by storm. Transported not just by this modern reimagining of La Boheme, but by the power of the music, the realness of it, and the raw energy of the narrative and the acting. Trying to stop my chest from heaving was an act of futility. I surrendered. A year later, I’d marry, and another of Rent’s iconic offerings, “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)",” would become the song Stephanie and I would share our first dance to.

As fate would have it, Larson never saw his masterwork performed on the Great Way. After a final dress run on January 24, 1996, the show's first preview was set for the following evening. Larson died hours before the curtain rose. An aortic dissection caused by undiagnosed Marfan syndrome consumed his last breath. He was 35.

I sometimes wonder what else he’d have experienced, and given the world. Similar to another musical hero of mine, blues guitarist and performer, Stevie Ray Vaughan. He, too, was 35 when a helicopter crash took his life, while touring with his brother Jimmie, and Clapton. A few years back, Jimmie shared parts of the story I’d never before heard in conversation on the Good Life Project podcast.

Both losses, unfathomable. And yet, dear Lord did they live those 35 years.

Neither stood on their island of opportunities, looking toward another land. They knew in every fiber of their beings, this was where it all needed to go down. There was no other life but this. No other road. No other way. No day but today. No time for delusion, delay, or regret.

As I’ve written in earlier Wake-Up Calls, the notion that we’re made no promises of a future is ever-present in my life. Not to the extent that it blinds me to the wisdom of preparing for a time to come. Nor to the detriment of my desire to vision and breath life into a future I want to make manifest. For me, and those I love.

I am a Maker. Have, and will always be, ferociously future-oriented. I live and breath possibility. Which is amazing. But, much as I seek to see, then bring a particular flavor of the future into existence, I can only live in the now. I’ve become deeply aware of that simple truth.

This IS the big show. Here, not there.

If we keep ourselves perpetually tethered to someday, or somewhere out there, we inevitably forsake this day. And, in turn, over time, this life.

As Thoreau wrote, “there is no other land,” and Larson confirmed, “no day but today.”

To the extent we have agency, autonomy, and competence, it reminds us to center, celebrate and savor the here and now. Even while playing in the land of possibilities, and dreaming of a life and world we seek to make real.

With a whole lotta love & gratitude,

Jonathan

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Wake-Up Call #27 | No day but today.

What have you been wanting to do or be or make happen that you’ve told yourself lies in another time or place you’ve yet to inhabit?

What if this was the time and place?

What would that look and feel like?

What would your first step be?

And, who might you invite along on the journey?

Noodle on it, think about it, walk with it, journal on it. Then, if you’re inclined, share your thoughts in the comments.

And share this Wake-Up call, so more of us can start feeling more alive and less alone.