I look back and say, Why, I'll be doggone. Where did it go? I was just in college. How come I'm seventy-one?
Bobby Bowden, 71 year old former football coach in Esquire Interview January 2002

Not long ago, I was playing golf, and I said to my partner, "Let those old geezers tee off first." And my partner says, "Kirk, those old geezers are fifteen years younger than you."
Kirk Douglas in an interview with Esquire January 2002

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
-Dale Carnegie

    Many of us live for tomorrow instead of trying to enjoy the moment.  Samuel Johnson once said

Happiness is not a state to arrive at but, rather, a manner of traveling.

    If we wait to arrive at a state of happiness we may never get there.  Some religious people even live for the afterlife.  Kirk Douglas in an interview with Esquire (Jan 2002) said:

Maybe when you die, you come before a big, bearded man on a big throne, and you say, "Is this heaven?" And he says, "Heaven? You just came from there."

   I was watching a TV show called Seventh Heaven and in it Annie Camden the wife of the preacher Eric Camden says that:

Heaven is family and friends and being around the people you love and who love you.

    I think that's true.  And our family and friends are on earth.  Heaven is on earth if we bring it here.  Heaven is life and heaven is now.  Now is the time to relax and smell the roses.   If we rush through life life will rush by us.

    If we want to make a change now is the time to make it.  If we are on a diet and as we dine on cheese cake tell ourselves we'll diet tomorrow, we are likely to tell ourselves the same thing tomorrow as we dine on more scrumptious desserts. 

     If life is now one might think that the time to eat cheesecake is now.  There has to be a compromise between living for tomorrow and living for today.  One doesn't have to do everything one feels an impulse to do in order to smell the roses.  One just has to take time to enjoy the moment.

    Harry Chapin wrote an excellent song about postponing life until tomorrow called the Cats in the Cradle.

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