“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” ~ Carl Jung
You’ve probably noticed that after 25, your life starts whizzing by like an out-of-control locomotive.
Where does the time go? Where does the life go? Where do I want life to go?
Have you ever sat down with a pen and pad and taken inventory of your life so far?
Are you going in the direction of your heart dreams or just a direction?
In my late twenties and early thirties, I was definitely going in the default direction and didn’t even realize I had other options. I got trained to follow the herd in front me, even when they galloped over me as I lay on the ground confused about the direction.
Don’t recall anyone ever telling me to seize the day and my life and make my own decisions. Think the first time I heard the term “seize the day” was watching Robin Williams in Dead Poet Society. Playing English teacher John Williams, he asked one of the boys in his poetry class to read the first two lines of To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
Then he explained the theory of “carpe diem” to the boys.
“Make your life extraordinary,” he advised.
I stared at the screen with a dropped jaw.
Carpe Diem? What a marvelous thing.
How come no one ever told me before about this carpe thing?
During my school years, they seemed more concerned with me standing in line correctly or checking off some requirements boxes.
Robins William’s character woke me up to my own mortality and my own ability to seize the day.
That movie has stayed with me for the part of my life that followed. I always ask myself, Am I seizing the day? Try to as much as I can.
Can you imagine that a fictional movie character showed me how to live more truly and widely than any human beings I ran into up until that point? Once I gave Carpe Diem the nod I began running into magical people I’d never noticed before. Like the guy who told me to quit my job without another one or the woman who recommended I read Women Who Run With The Wolves.
It was like a door opened up in front of me to a whole new way to go through life, in fact a door that showed me the essence of life itself.
Prior to that I must have been clueless that I had the power to make choices for myself.
That is what happens when we over-control children at young ages to keep them safe or keep them marching toward the conventional dream or keep them from expressing their own desires.
Then, at the high school or college graduation ceremony they shower you with “you can do it” speeches.
But how do you “just do it” when you’ve been told the entire time not to do it unless it follows the beaten path?
It makes it hard to do anything but walk in a straight line in front of you.
Wish I’d had teachers like John Keating encouraging me to fly … and to zig zag through life.
I’ve made up for lost time and am 94% good with my direction. It gets more clear every day I take a chance to do something new. Sometimes it works out great. Others times it fizzles.
Just the other day, something didn’t quite work out and a friend said, “But you keep trying, you keep going.”
Yes, what matters to me is that I try … I figured out after watching this film that I’d get nowhere in life without trying something new, without going in a different direction than the herd.
The first step toward your own path begins with awareness.
Are you aware of your current life direction? Do you ever take stock of where you have been so far? Are you aware that you have the power to change it? Are you prone to give excuses if anyone points this out?
Perhaps, sit down and answer those questions. Then take the results and mull over them. Is this the right direction for you? Or is this the direction you think you ought to be going in? Once you have that information you can seize the day and make it your own.
I will end with the question again, “What have you done with your life?”