The Disease of Tomorrow

It is necessary to work on yourself today. Each day is an epitome of your life. A day in your life is a small replica of your life. If you do not work on a day in your life, you cannot change your life, and if you say that you wish to work on your life and change it, and do not work on a day in your life, your work on yourself remains purely imaginary. You solace yourself with the imagination that you are going to work on your life and actually never begin to work on a single day of your life.

Your life is broken up into days and years. If you do not work on a day of your life by self-observation by means of applying the ideas of this work practically to what you observe, there is no starting-point. You say, perhaps, that you will work tomorrow. But it is always tomorrow. If you say: "I will begin to work on myself tomorrow," then you will never work on yourself, for it is always tomorrow that you will work and never today. This is sometimes called in the work the "disease of tomorrow." As long as you always say tomorrow, you will never change.

Maurice Nicoll, “On Work On Oneself” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 25).