Carpe Diem

Carpe Diem    

Carpe diem, my father said. Tempus fugit.  Like Montaigne’s father he believed in installing Latin in a child, but in my case only smatterings of Latin.  Still, I always remembered those phrases and the English equivalents to seize the day and savor the moment.  When later, in France, I encountered the phrase “Mettons cela à l’abri,” that became my personal motto.

Each morning from mid-May through Columbus Day and sometimes later I leave a warm bed to swim in Long Lake if I’m in Michigan, in Long Island Sound if I’m back in New Rochelle.  People think I’m crazy, and maybe I am, but I treasure that early morning swim that I have seized and put safely into that day whatever else it brings.  “Mettons cela à l’abri,” and it’s yours. Others jog or take out a canoe on the still waters at that same hour of the day. They, too, savor and save and have that memory—a sunrise, a pair of loons, the loughing in the trees--safely à l’abri.

Don’t postpone; don’t procrastinate.  Don’t wait until the sunshine turns into rain. Don’t miss out on greeting that friend, hearing that artist, seeing Hamilton, reading Shakespeare.

“Time’s winged chariot,” a favorite Wordsworth poem for my mother. Time waits for no one, or is that death? The same message from both parents, in both cases from a literary source. Was it their advancing age?  I was their youngest by a decade so never knew them when they didn’t have white hair. Did they feel time rushing by and intimations of their own mortality? Or was it the era they lived through that included both World Wars and the Great Depression?

The equivalent for today’s generation might be the shock of 9/11—the first attack on our own soil against our mightiest city—and the recession of 2008.  Economists are threatening another major recession soon, 2020 or 2021. Scientists across the globe are alerting us to the pandemic that is climate change as the Arctic melts and also burns and species are extinct by the millions.

What would my parents be saying if they were alive today? Would they have the same message? I think yes. Savor the present. Do what you can to preserve our planet, our civilization, our decency, our humanity. Fight the good fight, but at the same time enjoy. Seize the day or the moment.  Hug your loved ones. Bake bread.  Make music.  Dance.

If you don’t look up you’ll miss the rainbow or the eagle flying overhead or that first evening star. Look up.  Keep your eyes open whether you are eight or, like me, over eighty. Carpe diem.