Today is a present

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift – that’s why it is called present.” –from Kung Fu Panda

This isn’t a film review or something of that sort. And no, I’m not a fan of Kung Fu Panda, and it has really nothing to do with the animated film. I just like the line – worth a thought to ponder on. To a grammar guru it’s mediocre, but anyone who reads between the lines understands me very well.

I am a person who is so stuck with my past at the same time so worried about my future. There are just so many things in my past I’ve been dying to undo, and wrongs I’ve been wanting to right. I’ve been so wishful of could-have-been’s and should-have-been’s if things weren’t the same. And I’ve been so crazy about being able to glimpse at the uncertain future. What I was and what I will become I just can’t seem to reconcile.

I don’t have a happy childhood. Those youthful years I had spent with my mouth gagged, afraid to commit an unforgivable crime of speaking up – of just speaking up. Speaking up is as taboo an issue in our family as sex education usually is. No wonder this lack of self-expression has created a timid, bashful person that I am today. I’m struggling; yet I’m overcoming.

I’m hopeful of my future, yet there are certain areas of it that I’m just too scared to face head-on. Getting to the details is too early for me to do. Leave it to my thoughts at the back of my mind. What matters, I’m struggling, but I’m overcoming.

Yet at times I regress when confronted with thick clouds of burden from my past and uncertainties of my future. I carry on my back the cumbersome weight of both of these, wishful to shrink back to being a kid and remain to be one for the rest of my life. Unhealthy as I sound, but I do.

Then I realize I’m too busy trying to undo things of the past which can’t be undone and plan things ahead which are out of my hands that I have overlooked how I am doing at the present. How am I at the moment? Struggling, but overcoming.

That’s what matters. Today – my present – matters. It‘s the one that reconciles my yesterday and my tomorrow – the one that paves a road to my future. It doesn’t matter now how bumpy that road may get, or how many bends I should take, or how painfully searing the cuts and wounds from trip-offs and wild thorns may be. What matters I’ve been given today to accomplish whatever there is to.

For what I was and had been has made me the person I am today, and what I am and do at the present determines the person I will become tomorrow.
-T.S. Posa