Show me Someday on the calendar. Point it out to me in your daytimer. How long is a month of Somedays? Even blue moons happen once in a while (second full moon in a month), but Someday? The closest day to Someday is Never.

You think of things like that when you’re in the hospital, filleted like a mackerel and pumped full of really good drugs. As you lie there, having dodged death by a few hours and the services of an outstanding heart surgeon, you start thinking about all the Somedays in your life. And how those Somedays inevitably fade over to Never.

They aren’t very clear thoughts, because you’re not thinking clearly about anything after the ordeal you’ve been through. The clearest thing isn’t a thought at all, it’s a feeling; the feeling that this changes everything and that somehow you’ve got to respond to it.

I don’t advise waiting for open heart surgery to think about Someday. For one thing you might not survive the experience. The time to start thinking about Someday is today.

You need to make a list of your Somedays and convert it into real days. I mean that literally. Sit down and make a list of all the things you want to do someday and start scheduling them.

Don’t worry about how silly or trivial they might sound. Don’t think about how ‘unimportant’ they are. If you genuinely want to do them they are neither silly, trivial or unimportant. Instead start thinking about what you can do to make them real, and realizable. Turn them into real goals with real deadline, just like any other important project.

And don’t feel like a failure if some of the items on your Someday list turn out to be no so attractive when you try them. Some of them undoubtedly will be things that aren’t nearly as important when you try to do them instead of daydreaming about them. That’s fine. But you’d never have known in you hadn’t tried.

In my case my list of Somedays including learning how to cut and polish precious stones and make them into jewelry (both successes), learning to scuba dive (not so successful) and getting back into a club I had left many years ago. I’ve still got some items on my Someday list, but it shrinks year by year.

They say that having regrets is the worst thing about dying. Not having died, I couldn’t tell you. But I can tell you that almost dying with regrets about Someday sucks pretty hard.

Submitted by Rick Cook.