Gurdjieff delivered this powerful message to an old soldier, a man who had lived with guilt and remorse all his adult life. In the first World War, he had tried to save his friend’s life by carrying him away from the front lines on his back under machine-gun fire from a German unit. But once arrived at the medical tent, they discovered that his buddy’s body was riddled with the bullets aimed at them both. His friend had served as a shield and saved his own life.
We all carry a lot of yesterday inside, and it weighs us down. Maybe we lugged no bullet-ridden bodies on our backs, but we carry guilt and suffering that’s sometimes difficult to bear. How to find a path to accepting it as an aspect of the unique, wounded human being that we all are?
Years back, when I was in a depressed state after leaving my Peruvian husband and returning to New York to support my three young children, I carried a lot of self-blame for breaking up the family. One day, on my way to work in my usual state of grim determination to get through the day, I received a helpful message. As I waited on the subway platform, I was jolted by a song belted out by a black woman with a voice like an organ. “YESTERDAY’S GONE!” she intoned, her voice resonating up and down the tunnel. Then, more quietly, “Tomorrow may never be mine.”
Whoa! Those words in that prophetic voice shocked me out of my personal unhappiness, and demanded that I face this day like no other. Life’s challenges were not just about me and my family. Everyone must face life’s music.
I realized that yesterday introduced all of us to the price of living, to frustration, and the hard efforts to get what we wanted or needed — not to mention the compulsion to satisfy our desires. While tomorrow gets us out of bed every day to go to work. It must be for something, we assume. Not just for now, but for some future goal, some better situation. Or maybe it’s simply to earn enough to get food and shelter for ourselves and our family that we drive ourselves forward.
Nevertheless, day after day, whenever yesterday seems too much to bear, we try to drown “today” in forgetting, distracting ourselves in some of the many ways offered, from the pain.
“Wait a minute,” my subway thoughts continued, “here is today, all by itself. And here I am in the middle of it, waiting to wake up from yesterday and tomorrow. Maybe happy people can embrace today like a lover. Lucky them! But even if I’m aching in body and spirit, and nothing seems to solace the pain, I need to get into my real life. Today’s life, not yesterday’s or tomorrow’s.”
Right there on the platform I began to weep. Hmm. Somehow that helped. Perhaps there may be a way out of this inner desert. And just at that moment, the subway singer’s booming voice offered an alternative solution:
“Lord for my sake
Teach me to take
One day at a time.”
And I knew then what my work would be: today is the only day I have. And as for what happened yesterday, “Accept it like your skin.”
