There’s a line in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters that I keep coming back to:
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
For Lewis, humans live in time but are destined to eternity. In the book, a senior demon advises his nephew on how to tempt a human soul. Screwtape says to draw us away from the present and toward the future, “the thing least like eternity”. Nearly all vices, he explains, are rooted there. Fear looks ahead, as does ambition. We can lose days fearing things that have not happened, or years waiting to become the person we thought we were meant to be.
Lewis does not dismiss planning, for planning tomorrow’s work is one of today’s duties. But we ought not to give our hearts to the future. Our treasure does not lie there.