“What day is it?”
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.”
― A.A. Milne
I was reading online an article posted by a 46-year old banker in the UK who discovered that his wife of many years had been unfaithful. This led him to re-evaluate how he had approached his life generally and the effort he had put into his work life at the expense of his personal life. He concluded with an overall declaration of regret that he had not followed his dreams when he was younger. It was poignant stuff although, alas, a very common conclusion.
He urged those starting out on their own journey, in their teens, in their twenties, not to make the same mistakes he had.
Having stepped inside my fourth decade, I was clearly not the target for his advice. I could cling to the optimistic declaration of Victorian novelist George Eliot that It’s Never Too Late To Be What You Might Have Been, but any decision to alter my life trajectory now would mean slamming on the brakes and, as a result, looking like a walking mid-life crisis. Whether that’s right or wrong, a thought occurred to me that gave me pause: we can only live one day at a time. That may sound trite but bear with me.
There is of course real value in looking forward: planning for the future, and giving it purpose, is important. And there is always value in looking back (see my earlier post on scrapbooks). But still, living is only done day by day. We do not live in weeks, months or years – only days; just as you can only physically live in one place at a time, not several.
The day is the unit we live in because it is the unit into which the span of our life most naturally breaks down. Saying that we live moment to moment or hour to hour is less meaningful as they are not really units – they have no clear start or closure. But, at the end of a day, the curtain falls (metaphorically and literally) and the button is reset. There’s a reason the phrase is “carpe diem” and not “carpe septimana”…
I always thought that Philip Larkin’s poem Days was a bit inconsequential, but now for the first time some of its lines have much more meaning for me. The one stanza poem is here.
You can only live in this day – and nowhere else. That is living in the present: the best interpretation of carpe diem.
What has this to do with the banker’s story? After reading about the regrets of the money-rich, time-poor banker, I could have fixated about how well I had used the years gone by or obsessed about how I might use the years to come. Instead, I just thought about living in, and taking care of, the present: today.
Looking behind all the time is like doing so whilst gazing out of the window on a moving train. You fix your eyes on some distant point in the landscape that the train has already passed. The problem is that when you release your gaze from the point that has passed and return your focus to the present, your eyes instantly whiz past swathes of landscape that the train has rattled passed in the meantime, not having taken any in. The same happens when fixing your eyes on your destination ahead, (your goal, your ambition) in the distance: the landscape scrolling past the window, in your present, is ignored. John Lennon summed this up when he said Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
This is not a call to fixate only on today. The self-help mantra live every day as if it were your last is an engaging thought designed to draw your attention to the present, but nonsense if put into practice. If I followed that advice every day, then every day would start with a short text to my boss that I was not coming into work!
So I propose another mantra:
You can plan for tomorrow, you can learn from yesterday, but you can only live today