The saying “Today for you, tomorrow for me” is a popular saying based on the values of friendship, solidarity and, especially, reciprocity.
The saying implies the availability of a person to help someone with whom they have a friendly relationship, and who in the future hopes to count on their support.
The one who invokes the use of the saying is usually the person who comes solicitously to help the friend. Faced with the polite question “How shall I pay you?”, The good friend invokes the expression “Today for you, tomorrow for me,” as someone who says “don’t worry, you can correspond to me if necessary.”
In this sense, the saying represents life as a reciprocity of gifts. The payment of favors is not admitted, but mutual solidarity and the exchange of spiritual values are invoked, invoking the ability to correspond to the good received through another good.
An equivalent saying can be the following: “Make me the beard and make yourself the top”. Another that has a similar sense is: “Do it for me to do to you, that you are not God that you are worth to me.”
The expression “Today for you, tomorrow for me” was popularized and immortalized in a song by the artists Juan Manuel Serrat and Joaquín Sabina, included in the album Serrat and Sabina: The Titanic Orchestra.
The saying is also referred to in the Second Part of the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha , II 65.
