Building Tomorrow by Showing Up Today
Created at: August 10, 2025
The future is built by those who show up today. — Nawal El Saadawi
Saadawi’s Urgent Lesson in Presence
Nawal El Saadawi’s assertion carries the weight of her life’s practice. A physician, novelist, and feminist from Egypt, she was imprisoned in 1981 for her outspoken critique of authoritarianism and patriarchy. Even there, she showed up to her purpose: writing Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1983) with an eyebrow pencil on scraps of tissue. Her persistence under constraint illustrates the core claim that the future is not an abstraction but a product of concrete acts taken under imperfect conditions. By refusing to wait for ideal circumstances, she turned presence into authorship and authorship into influence.
Civic Participation Shapes Real Futures
From this personal testament, it follows that democratic futures are similarly built by those who appear in public life. Voting, canvassing, and attending school board meetings transform preferences into policy. Field experiments summarized in Gerber and Green’s Get Out the Vote (2004) show that modest increases in turnout can measurably shift outcomes, proving that presence scales. Long before modern social science, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) observed that local assemblies cultivate habits of participation that stabilize liberty. In other words, tomorrow’s institutions harden around today’s routines of showing up where decisions are made.
Movements Are Made by Showing Up
History bears this out in moments when bodies in particular places changed the trajectory of events. Gandhi’s Salt March (1930) turned a law into a visible injustice by walking it into public view. The Greensboro sit-ins (1960) demonstrated that persistent, peaceful presence could desegregate lunch counters and consciences alike. More recently, the Standing Rock encampments (2016) braided environmental and Indigenous rights into a living protest that reshaped public discourse. Across these examples, the catalytic element is not rhetorical brilliance alone but sustained attendance: people convening, returning, and remaining.
Craft and Science Reward Daily Routines
Beyond the public square, the same logic governs creative and scientific work. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) emerged from decades of daily note-taking, specimen cataloging, and methodical walks—a choreography of showing up that compounded into theory. Writers echo this discipline: Maya Angelou described renting a bare hotel room and writing each morning to keep her appointment with the page. Even a folk practice like Jerry Seinfeld’s don’t-break-the-chain routine captures the mechanism at play. While inspiration is intermittent, presence is programmable; over time, it turns effort into expertise.
Communities Built by Small, Steady Contributions
Likewise, durable communities form when individuals appear consistently to contribute small pieces. Wikipedia (launched 2001) did not arrive fully formed; millions of incremental edits accumulated into a living reference. Open-source software evolves through the cadence of commits, reviews, and releases, an ethos popularized by Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999): release early, release often. In both cases, the architecture of the future is modular, and the currency is attendance. When people keep showing up, distributed effort becomes shared infrastructure.
Turning Resolve Into Daily Action
Consequently, the path from intention to impact runs through habit. Implementation intentions, the if-then plans studied by Peter Gollwitzer (1999), translate goals into cues: if it is 7 a.m., then I draft for 25 minutes. Timeboxing and public accountability—posting progress or meeting with a peer—lower the activation energy of starting. Begin with the smallest consistent action that matters, then protect it with routine and reminders. As Saadawi’s life and these examples suggest, the future rarely arrives by epiphany; it accrues to those who are present, again and again, today.