John Dryden
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do they worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
I usually have a really, really hard time with old school poets and this guy is really old, writing in the late 1600s. But this poem is another perfect little specimen of living in the moment propaganda. "What has been, has been" and whatever tomorrow brings, so what, I've had a great time today. So helpful to read something like this especially given my own struggles to really embrace the now without dwelling on the past or fretting about the future. Maybe even more so now given this new context we have for the world around us....
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