Tomorrow is bought today

I recently chanced on a video of an ex-convict who was back in court for another crime. As he stood in the box for cross-examination, the judge looked intently at him. He would intermittently steal glances at her, too. 

After his cross-examination, she mentioned his name and asked whether he attended a certain high school. Startled, he burst into tears. He looked carefully at her and… he remembered. They sat in the same class! 

These were two people who were exposed to almost the same environment. They almost had the same opportunities in life. On that fateful day, however, life had separated them. 

One walked into the room as an ex-convict and the other, a judge. Between them was a physical distance courtesy of their choices and decisions.

Daily, we design the future we are going to live in. Our choices and decisions are God’s own way of giving us the power to create our tomorrow. This opportunity to choose predicts our tomorrow. If our choices and decisions were seeds, our future would have been the fruits.

Life is like a buffet. You choose what you want to eat. You choose whether or not you want to spend the future in poverty. As a man, whether or not your life will be free from the burden of side chicks and chicken is solely your choice. Your choices and decisions gradually mold for you the future you choose, not that which you desire.

Tomorrow is created today. The future is not desired. It is created. Like a potter, our choices and decisions are the clay we use to mold this future. The decisions we make for ourselves (and those we allow others to make for us) are the footprints that lead us to the tomorrow we have intentionally or unintentionally created.

Drunkards don’t earn their accolades in just a day. Their daily choices and decisions, as far as the bottle is concerned, got them there. A decorated footballer is who he or she is because of the daily investment they have made (or continues to make) in their chosen career. Today is a seed. Tomorrow is a fruit.

Every moment of our lives is a choice. It is a decision. Choosing to pray, for instance, is a decision just as choosing not to pray. Investing in your skills is a choice. Not investing in those skills is also a choice. We must, thus, be INTENTIONAL about the choices and decisions we make every minute of our lives.

Make wise financial decisions. Don’t live a life that runs on the wheels of debts and loans. Never borrow to impress. Eat what you can afford. Don’t start life as a hide-and-seek couple because you spent money you did not have on a wedding to please people you didn't know. Financial independence is intentional. It is a result of our daily choices and decisions!

Be convinced that you are making the right choice of a life partner. If it will take you forever to find them, let it be so. Be intentional about choosing character and not charm. 

Don’t entertain abuse of any manner because you are aging. Never settle for less in the name of a biological clock. Choosing a partner will have rippling effects on every facet of your life. The consequences of the wrong choice will live with you forever.

Choose the right career. At the end of the day, what will matter is how many people you have impacted. The right career becomes a pulpit you will use to meet the needs of others. When you choose the wrong career, you will always wish a new day never comes. When you choose the right one, you will always wish a new day never ends.

Many of us take for granted the power our choices and decisions wield in determining our destiny. The fact is, anybody we adore in life today is a total of the choices and decisions they made yesterday. We are who and what we are today because of yesterday’s choices and decisions. What and who we will be tomorrow will be because of today’s choices and decisions.

Nothing happens by chance. Everything is a result of choices and decisions. That is how you create the future you desire to live someday. If you see a well-structured city built today, you must know it did not fall from the skies. People intentionally CHOSE and DECIDED to build it. Any genuinely beautiful marriage you see is only a product of consistently sowing seeds of honesty, faithfulness, and love. It is a choice. It is a decision!  

The currency for buying the future is our choices and decisions. They order our steps either into greatness or peril. Like the game of chess, every move of a choice or decision we make matters. It inches us closer to our victory or failure. Life is a game and those who are going to win tomorrow start today.

Your tomorrow is only a product of your decisions today. You decide who and what you want to be tomorrow today. Your success, just as failure, is decided on today… intentionally or unintentionally. The power to be is in your choices and decisions.

Those who own tomorrow are those who are intentional about it today. A decade from now, what kind of children do you want to have? Start raising them today with those qualities in mind. Be intentional about inculcating into them your aspirational habits. If you want to have gifted children, for instance, start identifying and investing in their gifts today!

Choices and decisions have consequences. Other people’s consequences should be our place of learning. When you see a young man wasting all his time and savings on women of different shades, it is obvious he hasn’t learned much from King Solomon’s woes. 

Young people who will go to every length to bleach their skin are not learning from others who have perished from the same. A wise person does not wait to learn from their downfall. Instead, they learn from where others fell. 

Tomorrow is in your hands. Intentionally bought it today. Our nation’s tomorrow is in our hands today. We need to be intentional about buying it. The currency is the set of choices we will make today.

 A seed of corruption and selfishness cannot bear the fruit of the collective development we desire. Tomorrow is more than a desire. It must be INTENTIONALLY CREATED.

The writer is the Chief Scribe of Scribe Productions, an Accra-based theatre production house (www.scribeproductions.com).