"Don't take tomorrow to bed with you"
About this Quote
Peale’s line is pastoral triage: a brisk, bedside rule for keeping anxiety from turning into identity. “Don’t take tomorrow to bed with you” doesn’t argue with planning; it argues with the way anticipation colonizes the most private hours, when the mind is tired enough to treat imagined futures as certainties. The phrasing is deliberately domestic and physical. Tomorrow becomes a clingy partner you’re tempted to sleep beside, a presence that crowds the pillow and keeps you from resting in the only time you actually have.
The intent sits squarely in Peale’s mid-century ministry of morale, where spiritual counsel and self-help fused into an American vernacular: faith as psychological hygiene. Sleep is the sacrament here, and the sin is not doubt but rehearsal - running the next day’s script until it hardens into dread. “Take” is key. It implies agency: you may not control what worries appear, but you control whether you escort them into the room and give them sheets.
Subtextually, the quote offers a theology of limits. Tomorrow belongs to Providence, or at least to daylight, when choices can be made and problems can be faced with tools other than rumination. Night is for repair. The line works because it reframes worry as a category error, an attempt to live in an unarrived day while borrowing against the body’s recovery. It’s a gentle rebuke dressed as common sense: stop dragging the future into the one place designed to keep you alive for it.
The intent sits squarely in Peale’s mid-century ministry of morale, where spiritual counsel and self-help fused into an American vernacular: faith as psychological hygiene. Sleep is the sacrament here, and the sin is not doubt but rehearsal - running the next day’s script until it hardens into dread. “Take” is key. It implies agency: you may not control what worries appear, but you control whether you escort them into the room and give them sheets.
Subtextually, the quote offers a theology of limits. Tomorrow belongs to Providence, or at least to daylight, when choices can be made and problems can be faced with tools other than rumination. Night is for repair. The line works because it reframes worry as a category error, an attempt to live in an unarrived day while borrowing against the body’s recovery. It’s a gentle rebuke dressed as common sense: stop dragging the future into the one place designed to keep you alive for it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Live in the Moment |
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