Sometime in the late 80s, Robin Williams made a little piece of Latin very famous:
carpe diem.
It's hard to ignore that hairy hyperactive man (I mean he used to be Mork!), especially when he's standing on a desk, trying to inspire a room full of preppy teenagers. And why wouldn't one seize the day -- just grab it by the nuts, so to speak?
(I'm a little less eloquent than Mr. Williams.)
The dilemma is that the phrase is most often used as a hackneyed justification -- a sheepish, self-assured shrug-off of the world's responsibilities. Many view the phrase as a carte blanche to say,
I don't have time for this, I am busy seizing the day by the nuts, and this way of living is really deep because it goes way back to the time of the Romans, so leave me alone. In this era of immediate gratification, there's nothing like having a little bit of Latin to back-up one's behavior. I mean, what lends better credence than the ancient language of scholars?
A closer look at the phrase (and by that I mean looking it up on Wikipedia) reveals the following:
Carpe Diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace. It is
popularly translated as "seize the day", although a more literal translation of carpe would be "harvest" ("harvest the day"), as in the harvesting of fruit.
Ay, there's the rub! To harvest, according to the laws of nature as I understand it, one would have to do more than simply seize the day. Fruit to be harvested, after all, does not happen overnight. Somehow, a seed was planted, and a tree matured, and in the modern world, probably there was also a whole lot of fertilizing and pruning before anyone got to see that pretty fruit. For those
carpers of the diem out there ready to seize my apples, I am reminded of first grade math problems describing a certain Billy taking away four of Susie's apples, and let it be known, as a gardener and grower of the day, the Madwoman takes great offense.
I can point to one such carper, for example - the moose in my backyard, not exactly creatures enlightened with Roman insight. But they do carp my apples every year just as the fruit gets big enough to be worth looking at -- they take them away, just like that annoying little Billy from first grade.
Thieves, I call them.
To them, and to those other amateur carpers out there, I say, MOVE AWAY AND PUT THOSE APPLES DOWN, BILLY! If you want to harvest the day, you're going to have to grow it first.
It's not that I don't believe in living in the moment. There is something absolutely exquisite about holding each moment up to the light to see its glittering, unique opportunity and to step right into it. But our days are also made up of moments, and our months made up of days. And so on. And sometimes, I even get excited about the moments of the next day. That's right; I live under a foolish supposition that I just might live to see
tomorrow and harvest its fruitful offerings.
For one thing, how can I measure the moment or the day if I do not understand how it fits into eternity?
And let's be honest: most of us do live under The Foolish Supposition, even the so-called "free spirit" Billies so fond of the phrase,
carpe diem, man. For the most part, we hold down jobs, we pay taxes, we make plans to have dinner later in the week, or get our hair cut at the end of the month. We do this in the face of Adversity, Tragedy, and Death not because we are boring people or take things for granted, but perhaps because we have enough stubborn faith to look forward to tomorrow and don't want to take tomorrow for granted.
Otherwise, we'd all be sky-diving, scaling cliffs, eating beyond our heart's content and drinking ourselves to Oblivion.
... or splattered, obese, and pretty drunk off our asses. ALL THE TIME.
It's not quite Latin, but in the words of Mickey Mantle, famous Drinker-To-Oblivion who assumed that genetics and fate was going to limit him to only a short flash-in-the-pan life, "If I'd known I was gonna live this long, I'd have taken a lot better care of myself."
Mantle had requested that his friend and country singer
Roy Clark sing his favorite song "Yesterday, When I Was Young" at Mantle's funeral:
I lived by night
I shunned the light of day
And only now I see how
the years slipped away
I ran so fast time and youth ran out
So many
songs in me won't be sung
I now must pay for yesterday when I was young.
Suffice it to say, this is not the joyful noise of an ebullient skydiver. I doubt that Mantle thought by living like a flash with caution thrown to the wind, he would eventually die with such regrets.
In the end, our Present is full of opportunity costs, Roads Not Taken. But opportunity costs are not just confined to the day. There are long-term opportunity costs, too, as chances to grow a lifetime can be missed if one is too busy thieving in the moments.
To illustrate, today I descended into my basement, as the Madwoman tries to do every morning, to get my daily fix of dancing. I have been doing this off and on since last July, and nowadays, to squeeze it in before work, I can only manage about twenty or so minutes. Typically, I gravitate to my favorite dance songs - a little MJ, a little Madonna, and I'm embarrassed to say, a little Britney. (Have you tried dancing to Me Against the Music?) The songs I use produce immediate response as I have little time to warm up and think about what I'm doing. So I regularly dial right past any song in my extended
iPod playlist that is more than the typical four minutes. On most days, the Opportunity Cost of Fourteen Minutes seems too great.
And that's why, for months, I've been scrolling past Guajira Clasica from the mambo CD, "Ahora-Si."
Well, apparently I have truly been missing out. The song is a lengthy fourteen minutes long, and in the past, I never had the time (or more truthfully, the patience) to wade through any of it. For one thing, the intro is misleadingly slow. But after two minutes, the unmistakeable Latin rhythm enters (and by that I do not mean Horace's Latin) setting the listener on a path to an uncertain destination. Because it was by complete chance that I decided to give this track a chance today, the returns were fantastically unexpected.
And then It Happened. At Eleven Minutes And Thirty-Two Seconds into the song,
The Groove Set Me Free. Tucked in the last third of the song was Rapture, pure rapture in the form of wailing trumpets calling out in a way that demands an answer. It's the kind of melody that if played in a jungle, I daresay all kinds of interesting creatures would emerge in response. I had to go beyond the Moment to find it, but if I must borrow another hackneyed phrase, it was well worth the wait.
And there are lots of other examples of why it's worth taking that leap of faith to make time:
- slow braising meat
- practicing piano for years
- watching perennials spring back to life in the garden
- making your own mole sauce
- tending to a bonsai tree
- dancing in the basement
- aging a bottle of wine
- taking care of a friendship.
At any given moment, we are living in concentric circles of time. The second is part of a minute, part of an hour, part of a day, part of a year... part of a lifetime. All that we see in nature that is fleeting and ephemeral is apparent to us by the contrast of what remains. Last month, I was in a bar talking to a photographer from NYC (an Anchorage-rite now living in the Big Apple), and he was explaining to me that the lifetime of a rock - from creation to dust - is so long that we humans simply cannot perceive it. It is only by our short-sightedness that we fail to notice that rocks are alive.
Oh boy, rocks are alive!
It made me wonder if I slowed down enough, what else I might see brimming with life.
So to all those Billies out there,
carpe diem, but please save eleven minutes and thirty-two seconds for me.
Notice the smoky edges. That's from the smoke of at least eleven of my reindeer dogs sizzling on MA's grill.
