In "Dead Poet's Society" (1989), Robin Williams plays Mr. Keating. The plot unfolds at an exclusive eastern prep school.
On the first day of school, Mr. Keating takes his class of boys into the hallway to look at the pictures of deceased graduates. He calls on Mr. Pitts to read a poem, "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time." The poem begins with "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." Mr. Keating says the writer is trying to explain that they must "seize the day." When he asks the boys why the poet wrote that, one replies, "Because he's in a hurry." Mr. Keating says no, it is, "Because we are food for worms, lads! Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die."
The teacher then calls the boys over to cases of photographs. He asks them to take a look at those who graduated before them. "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. Lean in. Listen. Do you hear it?" Mr. Keating says in an eerie grave-like voice, "Carpe Diem! Seize the day, boys! Make your lives extraordinary!"
* * *
When young, we aspired to make our lives extraordinary. When older, we are more settled. We may see what we once saw as extraordinary now as ordinary, and vice versa. We may be quite content with what is in all its mundaneness and monotony.
Excitation no longer attracts us as it once did, but beauty attracts us more - not the fleeting illusions of beauty of younger years. We prefer to feel the silence and liveliness of the breath, the sunshine on our skin, our cheeks fill up and puff out when we laugh, the cawing of the crows in the trees, or the gurgling of a stream in the backwoods. We may be mesmerized by the fluttering about of the first butterfly in spring or the emerging heads of light green cabbage in the garden.
We no longer seize the day, but we do not ignore its preciousness. We are more attentive to things, including people, than we once were, for they are sacred in themselves, not merely as a means to something else.
We practice returning to this present moment to live fully the preciousness of the present, as something too precious to be frittered away in slumber and be cherished as a jewel of great price, beyond purchase - a gift.
We learn something beyond aspiring for the extraordinary. In one moment, we feel the extraordinary, in another, the ordinary. The ordinary is in the extraordinary, the extraordinary in the ordinary. It is all life.
If we cling to making life special, we miss the specialness of life in its mundaneness. How can we enjoy life while pressing onward to something else, then something else, then something else - the better always somewhere other than here? The best you other than the person you are now?
We can do nothing to make life other than it is now. And there is no other now. We can learn to see it for what it is - wonderful. But wonderful does not mean extraordinary. And wonderful does not mean pleasant, so the unpleasant does not negate wonderful at all.
Life appears to us as sometimes extraordinary and sometimes, most times, as ordinary. We realize life is not such changing appearances, however. In this, oddly, life becomes filled with wonder. Life has not changed, our eyes have.
Realizing all this, we now wish to live differently than we once lived. We want to live deeply and go even more deeply, and more - knowing, regardless of how deeply, deeply will always be nowhere other than here.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
