Someday

Tom Cruise is apparently this week’s muse.  My initial idea for today’s Wandering was to review the latest Mission Impossible movie.  When I talked through it with my wife, though, the conversation strayed into territory covered by a separate Cruise movie—Knight and Day.  In it, Cruise’s character makes the following comment: “Someday.  That’s a dangerous word.  It’s really just a code for ‘never’.”  Someday has been on my mind a lot, lately.

There’s nothing particularly deep about either that quote or the movie it comes from.  You’d be tempted to write it off as another teen exploring the depths of their shallow angst.  But I think we’re too quick to dismiss simple concepts as somehow beneath us.  It’s as if we’re so desperate to appear wise and mature that we automatically scoff at the simple clichés of youth.  Yet we forget that some of the most impressive figures in history have praised the value of simplicity.  Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bruce Lee—all people who led lives steeped in excellence with a fixation on simplicity.  Sometimes, what we need most is a simple truth.

Someday hovers in the no-man’s land between a wish and a goal.  We use it when we let ourselves taste the anticipation of an accomplishment, but refuse to put in the effort required to earn it.  Someday I’ll travel to that exotic locale.  Someday I’ll get that promotion.  Someday I’ll write that book. 

But not today.  Never today, because today has challenges and obstacles too numerous to count.  Today we are burdened with the reality of need instead of the hope of want.  When faced with today, we take whatever comfort we can in the ethereal nature of someday.

I see this in myself.  There’s a calligraphy pen set next to my computer that remains virtually untouched, an editing checklist for my novel stalled at the halfway point, and a host of other concepts and desires waiting for their someday.  As long as they have that wisp of an anchor to cling to, I can pretend that they are a part of me.  My identity claims them as future accomplishments, regardless of how much time goes into achieving them.  After all, someday I will.

Let us all strive to be a bit more like Tom Cruise this week.  Trade in your hundreds of translucent somedays for the heft and realism of one solid today.  Who knows—maybe someday it’ll pay off.