The sentence “tomorrow isn’t guaranteed” used to feel like a cliché to me, something you read on a postcard or see in a motivational quote and forget a few seconds later. Today, it does not feel like a sentence anymore. It feels uncomfortably close to the way the world actually works.
In the span of a few news scrolls, two places appeared on my screen: Bondi Beach in Sydney and Brown University in the United States. One is a place people imagine when they picture sunlight, sea, and holidays. The other is a campus where students walk between lectures, carry heavy backpacks, and think about exams and internships. On ordinary days, both look like safe backgrounds for a normal life.
And yet, in both places, people were suddenly shot.
Somewhere inside, I had been living as if tomorrow was naturally waiting for me. I planned next week, next month, next year with the quiet confidence that, of course, I would still be here. I spoke to people as if there would always be another chance to fix a sharp word, another weekend to apologise properly, another evening to finally say something kind that I postponed because I was tired. I kept telling myself that there would be time later.
Watching the footage from Bondi Beach, I kept thinking about how that day probably started for the people who were there. Families deciding what to wear, checking the weather, arguing lightly about when to leave, maybe being a little late. Students at Brown University, meanwhile, were in the middle of exam season, thinking about grades and futures and whether they had studied enough. None of them woke up that morning thinking: this might be the last sunrise I see. All of them probably assumed what I usually assume too: I will go out, I will come back, and tomorrow my life will continue where I left it.
That is the illusion these stories quietly cracked for me.
The question that stayed with me was very simple: is tomorrow truly guaranteed for me, or for any of us. Maybe being given a new day is not an automatic right. Maybe it is closer to something that is renewed, silently, one more time, without any written promise that it will happen again.
When I sit with that thought, a few ordinary parts of my life look different. An ordinary morning, which I used to treat as a hallway I have to walk through in order to get to the “important” part of the day, suddenly looks more like the day itself. The small routines, the way I make coffee, the way I talk to someone at the start of the day, the way I open my laptop and sigh before I begin work — these are not warm-up scenes before the real story. They are the story.
The worries I carry also feel slightly different. I still worry about money, health, responsibilities, the future, the usual things adults worry about. But when I remember that there are people who went to the beach or into a classroom and never came back, some of my smaller complaints sound thinner in my own ears. It does not mean my problems disappear. It just means I can see, more clearly, that even having the chance to be annoyed, tired, or stressed is already something that depends on being alive and being here.
I also notice how much of my procrastination is built on the belief that I can always do things later. I delay sending messages I know I should send. I postpone starting work that matters to me because I want the conditions to be perfect. I assume there will be a better day, a better mood, a cleaner block of time. Underneath all of that there is a quiet sentence: “I will still be here tomorrow, so it’s fine.”
These recent events did not turn me into a different person, but they did make that sentence feel less solid. I do not suddenly live every day like it is my last, and I do not think I can. But I find myself wanting to move a few things forward in time by just one step. If I was going to say “thank you” eventually, maybe I can say it a little earlier. If I was going to apologise “one day,” maybe that day can be closer to today. If I was going to start something that matters to me “when life is more stable,” maybe I can at least take one small step now, while I still have a chance to do it.
As I think about people who died in those places, I keep coming back to one simple idea: they should have had an ordinary tomorrow. They should have had the chance to be bored again, to complain about traffic again, to forget their umbrella and get annoyed about the rain again. The fact that this basic continuation of life was taken away makes my own next morning feel less like a default and more like a gift.
I still don’t really know how to live in a world where beaches and classrooms can turn into crime scenes. I do not have a clear answer for how much news I should read, how much I should protect myself, how much I should let these stories into my inner life. But I know at least this much: I do not want to keep living as if the future is a guarantee written in stone. I would rather hold it a little more lightly and hold today a little more carefully.
That does not mean I will suddenly become calm, wise, and grateful all the time. I will still have bad days. I will still waste time. I will still say things I regret and fail to say things I should have said. But underneath all of that, I want to keep one quiet sentence within reach: being given another day is not automatic. Because of that, I want to treat each day with a little more gratitude than before, even if that gratitude is small and imperfect and sometimes only appears at the very end of the day, when I am lying in bed and realising, once again, that I made it through.
Somewhere far away, there are families and friends whose tomorrow has been broken in a way I cannot fully imagine. I cannot fix any of that from here. All I can do is refuse to treat my own tomorrow as something I am entitled to, and instead see it as something that, if it comes, deserves to be welcomed, noticed, and not entirely wasted.
For those who lost their lives at Bondi Beach and at Brown University, and for everyone who loved them, I hope that the weight they now carry will be met with real support, not just headlines that move on. And for those of us who are still here, I hope that being reminded that tomorrow is not guaranteed does not only make us afraid, but also makes us live a little more honestly inside the time we actually have.