If you’re anything like me, most stress doesn’t come from what is — it comes from what might be. I can spend whole parts of my day planning, projecting, speculating, and worrying about events that haven’t even happened. My mind grabs onto a possibility, and suddenly it feels like a certainty.
Lately, I’ve been sitting with this, and I think my soul has been whispering something simple but hard for the human mind to accept:
Tomorrow doesn’t exist.
To us, that idea feels almost irresponsible — but anything we imagine about tomorrow is just that… imagined. We all know the sayings: “When it’s your time, it’s your time.” “We’re not guaranteed tomorrow.” Scripture even asks us plainly:
“Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
— Matthew 6:27
We know the answer.
Worry has never saved us.
It has never protected us.
It has never added even one minute to our lives.
One of my favorite pastimes — and one of my greatest traps — is planning.
Plan for the day, plan for tonight, plan for tomorrow, plan for the plan.
So much energy poured into anticipating moments that may never come.
Eckhart Tolle, a purveyor of radical presence, points us back to the only place that has ever truly existed: now. He doesn’t deny planning, but he reminds us not to mistake our thoughts about the future for the reality of the present moment.
If I’m honest, staying present is still one of my biggest struggles. In our sober network, we call it future tripping — building entire emotional structures around something that isn’t real. And it’s true:
The future isn’t real because it hasn’t happened. It may never happen.
In sobriety circles and the Big Book of AA gives us a simple anchor to return to:
“Thy will be done.”
In other words, whatever comes — whatever tomorrow brings or doesn’t bring — God will be there.
Not waiting in some distant moment, but already present, already steady, already guiding.
“Thy will be done” frees me from believing I must control everything.
It reminds me that I don’t walk into the future alone…
because God doesn’t exist later —
He exists now.
So today, I try — imperfectly — to remain spiritually centered. To allow God to keep me company in the only moment that has ever belonged to me. And when my mind starts racing toward something imagined, even something as small as “later this afternoon,” I say simply:
We’ll see.
We’ll see becomes a release.
A surrender.
A quiet agreement with God that I will stay right here, in the moment where He actually meets me.
Let the mind wander, but don’t follow it into rooms that don’t exist yet. Your true life — the one God is actually with you in — is this breath, this moment, this ground beneath your feet.
If you’re reading this, you’re here.
Not in tomorrow. Not in next week.
Here.
And when the future tries to pull you out of the present, answer it with the peace of someone who trusts God:
We’ll see.
