Have you ever seen Free Beer Tomorrow signs in a bar? I always crack up at these signs. Can you imagine someone falling for the sign and believing they were going to get free beer the next day? When you show up the next day to get your free beer, the sign is still going to read Free Beer Tomorrow.

As it turns out, plenty of people fall for those signs. I have a coworker who is a former bartender, and she swears that she used to get at least one person a week who came looking for the free beer. They were sadly disappointed to realize that the date had changed, but they hadn’t actually arrived in tomorrow.

The truth is, we all fall for this reasoning sometimes. We think if this or that happens, or when the weekend/vacation/bonus check/etc arrives, then I will be happy. Happiness doesn’t work that way, and neither does time.

Sure, we might be happy about time with friends and family or a vacation, but when we believe those things make us happy, we start becoming beholden to the idea that the outside world creates our inner thoughts and feelings. We also believe that another time and place can make us happy even though we never – ever- leave now and today. It’s a trap that can get very sticky quickly.

As you travel across the timeline of life, the dates and times change names, but you never arrive at any. You just pass through them. As you pass through each date and time, you travel in the same vehicle, the moment called now. We only ever exist in now, which happens today, and we can never leave it for another moment.

So here is to not wishing away your time. Enjoy today. Get after it now. It’s all we ever get.