Seneca wrote a letter almost two thousand years ago to a friend named Paulinus who was always too busy. The line I remember: “the problem is not that life is short. The problem is that we waste most of it. Some of us looking backward. Some of us looking forward. Most of us refusing to look at the present at all.”
Two thousand years later, here we are and we have even given the disease a rhyme.
Shoulda. Coulda. Woulda.
Three words that feel like confession and function like escape.
I think these are not three different failures but the same failure wearing three different masks. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Shoulda is the regret mask. It looks backward:
“I should have taken my faith seriously in my twenties” and it dresses up as humility. It isn’t humility. It’s a way of living in a past that doesn’t exist so you don’t have to act in a present that does.
Coulda is the capacity mask. It looks sideways “I could be the kind of person who prays daily, who reads scripture, who actually lives this out, if I were wired differently” and it dresses up as self-awareness. It isn’t. It’s a permission slip you wrote yourself, excusing you from trying.
Woulda is the conditional mask, and it is the most respectable of the three. It looks forward — “I would get serious about my walk with God once life settles down, once this season passes, once I have more time” — and it dresses up as reason. It isn’t. It’s a future you have already decided not to build.
All three have the same engine underneath. All three are ways of refusing to live in the only tense a human being actually has, which is the present.
I know because I lived inside all three for years. I made deals with God. More than once. Every one of those deals came with a shoulda, a coulda, a woulda attached. I should have done this years ago. I could be the kind of man who walks with God if I weren’t carrying all this baggage. I would get serious about my faith or health once I had proven something to myself first. Three masks. Same face underneath and every time the pressure lifted, I walked away.
Two years ago I had an accident that nearly killed me. In the hospital, staring at the ceiling, something in me went very quiet. I remember thinking — none of those sentences has ever said a single prayer. None of them has read a single psalm. They have been doing nothing this whole time except narrating my failure back to me in the three tenses the English language allows.
That was the pivot. Not the accident. The sentence I said to myself about the sentences.
A few days later I sat in my hospital bed, across from my spiritual advisor and priest and told him I wanted this time to be different. He looked at me for a long moment and said four words. “Don’t screw this up.”
He didn’t soften them and didn’t need to. He had heard the shoulda-coulda-woulda from me before, and he was calling me back into the present tense.
Here is the one concrete thing I would leave you with.
Catch the word. Convert the sentence.
When you hear yourself start a thought with shoulda, coulda, or woulda, stop mid-sentence. Just stop. Then ask one question. What can I do in the next five minutes? Not the next five years. Not next month. Five minutes. One prayer. One page of scripture. One phone call you have been avoiding. One honest sentence to God about where you actually are.
Then do it. Not because it will change your life in the next five minutes, it won’t. But every time you interrupt the loop with a small present-tense action, you teach yourself a new sentence. The new sentence is I can do something now and the old sentences get quieter, one small act at a time.
Here is the truth. The excuse loop is a theological problem before it is a psychological one. When we live in shoulda-coulda-woulda, we have quietly cast ourselves as the author of the outcome. We are protecting a self-image from a future we do not control. The future though, was never ours to control. Which is good news!
You were never asked to write the whole story. You were asked to take the next faithful step.
So take it.
And when the loop starts again — and it will — come back to the old prayer.
Thy will be done.