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Thoughts on Tomorrow
Written for TomorrowAnew.com
I’ve written this for TomorrowAnew.com, a website I helped create that asks, “What will be different tomorrow?” and raises funds for charities including GiveDirectly, which provides unconditional cash transfers to poor families in Africa and the US. You can add your own thoughts with the “Join us!” link at the website.
Tomorrow will be a heartache.
We’ll grieve for the millions who draw their final breaths separated from their loved ones. We’ll long for the embrace of a relative, the sight of a friend up close, the contact that makes us human. We’ll mourn the collective experiences and serendipitous interactions of a bustling world.
Tomorrow will be a challenge.
It will be easy to let our temporary quarantine calcify into permanent isolation, to focus on those most near rather than those most in need, to ignore the other pressing problems of our time. Those who value integration, benevolence, and progress — locally and globally, short- and long-term — will have to work harder to continue the positive momentum of the recent past.
Tomorrow will be an opportunity.
Ingenuity will serve a new level of purpose, whether in connecting us, healing us, or governing us, if we can nurture it. This reminder of our shared humanity might unleash the power of global collaboration, if we can abandon the barriers preventing it. Disarray offers us chances to reconsider the status quo and cultivate a more resilient modernity, if we can provide the stability necessary to accept change.
Tomorrow will be both unavoidable and easily postponed, divisive and unifying, destructive and creative. Our choices tomorrow won’t undo today’s damage, but they will shape the world for the day after.
