Tomorrow never comes

Living inside the magical forgetting machine

I started to understand recently that not everyone has music playing in their heads all the time. At any given moment, you can ask me what’s playing and I can check my brain and tell you. It’s as if, in parallel to my noisy mind commentary, there’s a subliminal soundtrack running the background to my life movie.

Sometimes this track is a brain worm I don’t like that lodged in my memory and won’t get out – it may even wake me in the night or accompany my fumbling visits to the bathroom. I remember one devastating 15 hour overnight bus ride as a 24-year old in Thailand when I was tormented all night by East 17’s House of Love.

This week has been dominated by Adele’s Skyfall - a rousing, melodramatic piece from 2011 that makes me feel simultaneously like an ultra-masculine hero and a teenage girl. This works ok for a day or two, but by hour 72 it starts to wear, especially when I’m trying to get back to sleep at 3am or in a business meeting. As a result I’ve been working hard to dislodge it without making room for the dangerously insane Diddy Blud introduced to me recently by my 10 year old.

Then, yesterday - finally - as I was taking a walk in the park outside my office, a random song appeared in my head, unbidden, to displace it.

I had to play the tape over in my head a few times to figure out what it was, until the lyrics started to emerge from the darkness. When a track arrives randomly like this, apropos nothing, I always ask myself: what’s it about? What is my pattern-spotting, meaning-making subconscious trying to tell me?

The tune in this case was one I had listened to on someone else’s playlist a week or so earlier, called Six Days. The song itself - I discovered later - is an upbeat remix of a depressing anthem about nuclear war written by a 1970s band called Colonel Bagshot. But my subconscious didn’t know any of this. All it cared about was the chorus line, which was simply: Tomorrow never comes until it’s too late.

I understood this immediately as a complaint from my Inner Achiever - the part of me that grinds it out day-after-day because it doesn’t know any other existence. Clearly my worker bee was feeling demoralised. Clearly I had been falling into the trap once again of toiling towards an imaginary future via a not fully enjoyable present.

For clarity, my present isn’t bad; in many ways it is rich and beautiful; but my life still includes elements of grindy toil - every day - that crowd out joy, creativity and ease.

This carries on rather endlessly despite knowing full well that, for example, I’d prefer not to sit in front of a computer for longer than 4 hours a day. Why - after everything I know? What reality am I imagining will one day exist which will magically allow me to arrange my work in a way that suits me, if I can’t do it right now?

And I’m a coach!

Workers of the world

Humble and kindly souls that we are, we easily put the blame for our failures on ourselves - not enough willpower, character, clarity etc. But the fact is we live inside a system where every single other human is also trying to get ahead. This creates the strange hall of mirrors known as ‘must do better’ or - to use another wild metaphor - a vast planetary treadmill populated by billions of mice-humans each chasing each other around. The faster you run, the faster everyone else runs - and vice versa. It’s a sort of magical forgetting machine.

And so ‘balance’ remains a fantasy, forever on the edge of the horizon.

Every now and then a person (like this guy) achieves what they toiled at - and then realise that nothing has changed, and they're still running in circles. Sometimes they then finally stop trying to achieve anything. Sometimes they just find some other stupid thing to do.

So what

Many of us have been constitutionally trained to chase the imaginary rabbit we call ‘results.’ Getting results feels good but spending all my hours chasing them does a strange thing to my brain: it makes it forget that I live inside today, and will never live anywhere else.

As a result I forget what I wanted in the first place. And it’s important to remember what you want. Arguably the most important thing of all.

So my question for you, dear reader - if you’ve got this far - is: What are you delaying til tomorrow? For tomorrow may never come.

Or if that doesn’t work:

What part of your life are you putting up with in the expectation that one day it will eventually change - only without you taking any action in that direction?

Or more bluntly:

What are you doing here?

Also - do you have music in your head?

Laurence