It has been said that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in one sitting on a teletype paper scroll. It does not matter for my purposes that this claim is almost certainly false. It does not matter that the outcome of his actual procedure, whatever it was, is egregious. (As Capote remarked of the novel, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”) It matters only that the idea provides a helpful analogy for a following fact. Each day we write the story of our life on the cosmic parchment of the universe. One day we will finish and everything we have done will be published and God will judge its worth. There are no drafts. We cannot insert a single line. We cannot blot a single line. With Pontius Pilate, we must say to our judge, Quod scripsi, scripsi. What I have written, I have written. The point is this: The immutability of the past imposes on the present the profoundest imaginable significance. The eternal now is the point at which our pen touches the sacred living parchment of the universe and leaves its indelible mark. Perhaps my failure to remember this is due to the fact that my choices are transient and occur within such modest limits. Perhaps I imagine that the latitude and contingency that attend the eternal now in which I exercise my free will extends to the marble wall of the past onto which my choices are ineradicably engraved. But consider the tremendous finality and importance of your choices. Consider what should be too obvious to warrant mention but is so often overlooked: The way you live your life today determines how, for all eternity, you will have lived your life.