Carpe diem. That’s the short, latin version. I like the american version by Bill Watterson, too.
Calvin: ‘My elbows are grass-stained, I’ve got sticks in my hair, I’m
covered with bug bites and cuts and scratches…
I’ve got sand in my socks and leaves in my shirt. My hands are
sticky with sap, and my shoes are soaked! I’m hot, dirty, sweaty,
itchy and tired.’
Hobbes: ‘I say consider this day seized!’
Calvin: ‘Tomorrow we’ll seize the day and throttle it!’
Well, my day was not precisely throttled. I’m sorry to say I spend it feeling unwell, physically, and very reflective, mentally (not so sorry about that part). Reading back on old writing, some dating back to 1995, always reminds me of how foolish a creature the human is … or if nothing of so broad a scope, how foolish I am, particularly. On the bad days, this gets me down. On the good days, I revel in it. After all, the implication of looking back on your life and not feeling foolish is that you have not grown, not changed, and can’t blush at your own naivety because you have not yet realized and overcome it. This victory, of course, only heralds in new battles, more naivety … of a heightened kind, maybe so and maybe not, but new. Every day IS a new day, and we awaken as new people not only every morning, but every hour and every minute. What I am now is not what I was even 30 seconds ago, where I was only beginning to formulate a thought that the present me has already had and the future me will one day have long since forgotten.
Today, I work in a library, and it is, in many ways, a standard 9-5 type of job. Tomorrow I may be in my car driving to New York to make my living as a street poet. That there is only a tiny fraction of a percent of a whisper of a chance that that might in fact come to pass does not really lessen the idea as a possibility.
And the point is, we have choices. Not just little choices like: “What tie shall I wear today?”, or “What shall I have for dinner this evening?”. And not only big choices like, “What will I do for a living?” or “Should I ask her to marry me?” In every second of every day there are a million (literally) and more choices waiting to be made, turned down, ignored, hesitated upon, and overlooked. Every positive choice I make is a million negative choices at the same time. That I choose to type this also means I’m choosing not to get a drink of water, not to write something else, not to watch TV or read a book, get more firewood, build a swimming pool, go for a walk, move to New York, call a friend, learn to speak Polish, buy a gun, kill someone, overthrow the political system, streak the town or go out dancing. If you think about it, the amount of “no” you say everytime you say “yes” is staggering.
The point of all this is that maybe some of the “no” should become “yes”. I think a lot of people make decisions because they don’t realize that there are other, valid choices out there. I feel secure in my choices because I am willing to recognize the other possibilities. I am happy doing what I do because I choose to do it, out of a million other things I could be doing. Most of the time, saying “no” to a choice is subconscious, an automatic response that accompanies saying “yes” to another choice you may have grown so accustomed to making that you have, in your own mind, raised it from beyond being a choice to now just being “how things are”.
“How things are” is a lie. It’s a comfort we want to use because we are afraid, as Mandela says, not of our weakness but of our great strength. It’s not scary to have no choices. What’s frightening is having countless choices. Each of us is nothing less than a god, with complete dominion over the most essential: ourselves.
You are responsible for every minute detail of your life. You can change, and you can stay the same, and either involves making one or numerous choices. There is ABSOLUTELY no such thing as being powerless, especially not concerning who you are.
In twenty years, I’ll look back on writing this, and I’ll surely feel foolish for sounding like a damned fortune cookie. But I chose to write this, instead of a million other things I could have done, and I’ll not regret that.
“Action is choice; choice is free commitment to this or that way of behaving, living, and so on; the possibilities are never fewer than two: to do or not to do; be or not be.” -Isaiah Berlin, From Hope and Fear Set Free
In the end, all it is: carpe diem.