Funny how you wake up in the morning and everything is just as it was yesterday, except that the one who first made me think about the transience of our lives is no longer with us. Soon he will fertilise daffodils… It feels like a cruel thing to say but isn’t he the one who encouraged us to live fully and seize the moment especially because one day we will all become fertiliser to some plant or another? It’s just that now that he’s gone, our own fate is no longer as distant as, for instance back in 1989, when life seemed as wide and as full of possibilities as the sky itself.
“They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – – Carpe – – hear it? – – Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.” ― says Robin William’s character in Dead Poets Society.
I promised myself when I first saw the film that I would stop from nothing to make my life extraordinary. And I tried. But life sometimes works like a tide and with every forward step I took, it felt like I was being pulled ten steps back. But it’s ok, I’m still alive. I can still seize the day, I can still swim against the current. I can still do something about it.
But he is gone. He who made me think in my teens of how much I owed it to myself to live life to the fullest and it saddens me that I needed such a strong reminder of how little time we have on this Earth to do something meaningful. So I feel obliged to honour this realisation somehow. Perhaps by seizing the day. And strive for that extraordinary one more time.
