Yesterday or Tomorrow - Rick

Ah, the philosophical questions! These are the ones that get the blood flowing for those of us of a curious and analytical bent.

On first reading of the question, I am challenged by the necessity to ask more questions, starting with “What do you mean, ‘had to choose between yesterday and tomorrow’?” Choose in what context? For what purpose? On the most simplistic of levels, I choose “tomorrow” over “yesterday” because I like the sound of the rrs in “tomorrow”. So I like the word better simply as a word.

On a more complex context, is this something like the movie Groundhog Day in which I will spend the rest of my life either in “tomorrow” or “yesterday”? Or still on movie themes, is it more like being posed the question by the psycho in No Country for Old Men in which one answer means he will plug a bolt into my head and the other answer means he politely says goodbye and goes on his way.

So my answer at first demands of me that I ask the questioner for more information. I wouldn’t be able to answer the question without further questioning because I don’t know what the question means or what the consequences are of choosing “yesterday” over “tomorrow”.

See that’s me, and I think that is pointing to the way I would choose. Maybe I’ve already chosen and chose “tomorrow.” I’m a why kind of guy possibly by nature and definitely by training. Why I’m a why guy I’m not sure of except to say that I can never remember not being that way, so maybe it’s genetic. Genetic or training, I’m that way.

Well one of the things that a why guy has picked up and resolved over the years is that the past is the past. It’s gone. All my yesterdays are gone, never to be repeated. That’s just the way that it is. Of course I’m an open minded guy too, so if you present me with a time machine and I can visit some of my yesterdays I might say yes. But until then, the past is gone.

Ah, but that leaves “tomorrow”. While I also have resolved that I will actually live my entire life in the here-and-now present, I have also resolved that this is likely not my last “today”. As the great Bard once said

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;”

Until my last syllable is uttered I will have my “tomorrow”, and one thing us why guys always do is spend heaps of time today, some say too much, worrying, fretting, dithering, contemplating, planning, dreaming, scheming and pretty much any other gerund you can think of about “tomorrow”. That’s what we do.

So answering the question without being able to ask any other questions (which seems to me to be the way these prompts work), I would answer:

“I choose tomorrow because I already did.”