The Things You're Saving for Later

There is the good candle you’ve never lit. The nice bottle waiting for the right night. The outfit kept for an occasion that keeps not arriving.

You are saving them for later. And later has a way of never quite coming.

The special occasion is a trap

Waiting for the perfect moment feels responsible, even reverent. You don’t want to waste the good thing on an ordinary day.

But ordinary days are what you have. They are almost all of your life. By reserving your best things for rare, perfect occasions, you quietly rule that most of your days aren’t good enough to deserve them.

And often the saved thing is simply lost — the candle outlasts the reason you were keeping it. This is the same delay dressed up as care that runs the someday that never comes.

Use it on a Tuesday

An ordinary day is not a lesser day. It is the day you are actually alive in. Treating it as worthy of your good things is the whole move behind learning what you’d do with one ordinary day — you’d stop postponing it.

The nice thing used today is worth infinitely more than the nice thing preserved unused forever.

The one action

Look around and find one thing you’ve been saving for a special occasion. Decide that today is the occasion. Use it — light it, open it, wear it — for no reason other than that you are here now. Notice that the day was good enough after all.

That’s enough for today.