TUESDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2004
The brain is like a computer – the first few minutes after turning it on in the morning, the files and programs that were active the previous night slowly reactivate. After a few minutes a familiar character makes his or her reappearance: you are again embarrassed about the previous night’s incident (because the “program” that had been installed years ago also reactivated to stimulate a feeling of shame); you are excited again about the same things; you’ve got the same dreams, the same ambitions and the same beliefs. Some uncertainties, embarrassments and anxieties may have died down somewhat, but you’re essentially the same person.
Can it therefore still be said that it’s a new day? As I am sitting here writing these words it is “Tuesday morning” at “08:06”. I just had breakfast. It’s fairly early in the morning, and yet it is thirteen and a half hours after my dinner “last night”.
Janis Joplin once said (or screamed), “Because as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man! It’s all the same fucking day, man!”
Yet, the idea of a new day is much too valuable to abandon on a technicality. Every new Time Unit of Daylight followed by Darkness offers several possibilities that can never be underestimated: opportunities to make a mess of things, opportunities where your life may be at risk, opportunities where your life may end the next moment … and opportunities to stop messing around, and to get on a better path than the one on which you’ve been wasting time so far.
A new day then – even if it is only because it sounds more poetic – is waiting for me, and for you …
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