Carpe Diem! How the philosophy of ‘seize the day’ was hijacked and what the phrase should mean – iNews

Carpe diem, meaningseize the day, is one of the most powerful philosophical ideals. Now its used to sell trainers, T-shirts and a carefree lifestyle (#YOLO). But Roman Krznaric wonders if were getting the message

On a summers morning in 2014, 89-year-old Bernard Jordan decided to escape. The former British naval officer was determined to go to Normandy to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings with other veterans. But there was a problem: he was trapped in a care home in Hove, without permission to travel. What could he do?

Bernard came up with a cunning plan. He got up early and put on his best suit, making sure to pin on his wartime medals, then covered his outfit with a grey raincoat and sneaked out of the home. Now free, he tottered down to the railway station nearly a mile away, and took the train to Portsmouth. Once there, he boarded the ferry to France and joined a party of war veterans who took him under their wing.

As soon as the care staff realised he was missing, a frantic police search began. But it was too late. Bernard was already across the Channel, surrounded by marching bands and dancing girls. I loved every minute of it and would do it again tomorrow it was such an exciting experience, he said on his return. I expect I will be in some trouble with the care home, but it was worth it.

The story of Bernards great escape took the British media by storm, knocking the sober anniversary speeches by world leaders off the front pages. The ferry company even offered him free travel to Normandy for the rest of his life. But Bernard was never able to take up that offer: six months later, he died.

Why did Bernards adventure capture so much public attention? It was not just nostalgia for the wartime spirit or his venerable age. People also admired his courage to seize a window of opportunity. The chance was there, and he took it. As one person commented in an online forum just after his death: RIP, am doubly glad he escaped and got to go to the anniversary carpe diem.

Carpe diem seize the day is one of the most powerful philosophical ideals to have emerged in Western history. First uttered by the Roman poet Horace over 2,000 years ago, it retains an extraordinary resonance in popular culture.

The heavy metal band Metallica have rocked audiences around the world with their song Carpe Diem Baby, while the actress Dame Judi Dench had CARPE DIEM tattooed on her wrist for her 81st birthday. Its a message found in films such as Dead Poets Society, in one of the most successful brand campaigns of the last century (Just Do It), and in social media #yolo (you only live once).

You can even get T-shirts with the slogan CARPE THAT F****NGDIEM.

The message of carpe diem matters more than ever today. We live in an age of distraction, where we are checking our phones, on average, 110 times a day, and are more interested in being spectators of life on the screen than living it for ourselves. Immersed in the second-hand pleasures offered by our electronic gadgets, we need to reconnect with the wisdom of carpe diem, a philosophy which calls on us to taste the wonders of experiential living in the short time we have before death.

The challenge, however, is that many of us are losing touch with the deep carpe diem drive that has motivated people such as Bernard Jordan. The possibilities of radical aliveness are slipping away from us. The reason? Carpe diem has been hijacked. Its the existential crime of the century and one that we have barely noticed. Who, or what, are the hijackers?

First, the spirit of seize the day has been surreptitiously hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping sprees and the instant hit of one-click online buying Just Do It has come to mean just buy it.

Alongside this is the growing cult of efficiency and time management that has driven us toward hyper-scheduled living, turning the spontaneity of Just Do It into a culture of just plan it.

Finally and though it might seem counter-intuitive carpe diem has been hijacked by the booming mindfulness movement. While practising mindfulness has many proven benefits, from reducing stress to helping with depression, one of its unintended consequences has been to encourage the narrow idea that seizing the day is primarily about living in the here and now. Just Do It has become just breathe. The popularity of present moment awareness which is so attractive in an age where we are busy doing rather than being is crowding out the variety of ways that human beings have discovered over the centuries to seize the day.

Confronted by these hijackers, we need to rediscover five approaches to seizing the day that have emerged since the days of Horace as an antidote to our awareness often fleeting that our time is running out.

The most popular form of seizing the day I call opportunity its about following Bernard Jordans example and taking windows of opportunity that may never be repeated, whether its the career break of a lifetime or the chance to rescue a crumblingrelationship.

Its worth knowing that the word opportunity comes from the Latin ob portum veniens, meaning coming toward a port. It originally referred to a favourable wind that would blow a ship into harbour. So the question is whether were going to hoist our sails and catch this propitious wind, or whether we are so worried about hitting the rocks that we keep the sails down.

A second strategy is hedonism, where we seize the day through sensory pleasures, from free love to gastronomic exploration. Hedonism has an admittedly bad reputation, being associated with binge drinking and Trainspotting-style heroin overdoses. But dont forget that hedonism in healthy doses has been a route to human wellbeing for millennia: when the conquistadors arrived in the Americas, they discovered the Aztecs tripping on magic mushrooms. Downing a few tequila slammers or smoking a joint under the stars can sometimes help us with our troubles just as much as a trip to a therapist.

Another form of carpe diem is presence, which is about stepping into the now. Mindfulness meditation is one way of doing this, but there are other options such as what psychologists call flow experience. This is where you engage in a challenging and often vigorous activity that completely absorbs you in the present moment, like a high-speed basketball game. Youre utterly in the zone. Entering the now through the intense rush of sports is quite different from doing so by practising breathing techniques.

Fourth is spontaneity, which involves throwing plans and routines to the wind and becoming more experimental in the way we live. We need to liberate ourselves from our electronic calendars and booking up our weekends weeks in advance, and recover a more unplanned approach to the art of living which existed before the Industrial Revolution, when we werent constantly checking the time and obsessed with being efficient and productive.

Finally, we need to rediscover political carpe diem. This is about taking the four other forms of seizing the day opportunity, hedonism, presence and spontaneity and ratcheting them up from the individual to the collective level through mass political action. Think of the carpe diem demonstrations that brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989, which were full of spontaneous and hedonistic spirit. We need more of this today to challenge the big issues of our time, from climate change to the rise of far-right extremism.

Look at your own life and you may see an abundance of these five approaches to seizing the day. But you might also notice a deficit in one or more of them. Now is the moment to look away from the screen and embrace a life inspired by those two words: carpe diem.

Roman Krznarics new book, Carpe Diem Regained: The Vanishing Art of Seizing the Day(20, Unbound)

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Carpe Diem! How the philosophy of 'seize the day' was hijacked and what the phrase should mean - iNews