Carpe Diem

Carpe Diem.
What does it mean? What is it suggesting? Is it a cliché or some words of wisdom that we ought to follow? Or is it just mere words in Latin that are supposed to mean something but really means nothing?

For quite sometime now, well, I could say for the majority of my early adult existence, I believed I did live through those words in one way or another. There was a time when I have been doing the carpe diem thing even before the connotation was cool, if ever it became really cool, that I don’t know.
Carpe Diem, it means to “seize the day”. So there, I did seize some of my days. Some days brought me broken hearts and broken bones. Some are blissful. Some are sober. Some are worth it. Some are not. But in the end I have no one to blame or congratulate but myself.
There were also days that I did not seize. I did not even see those days as they came and went. I may be too lazy to seize it or too busy to notice. It just passed me by like a bad weather or a good breeze.

But what are we capturing really? Is it the chance or the opportunity that as one might put it, may only come but once? Or is it the idea that everyday is different from the one gone or from the next so we have to live it as much as we can in order not to miss anything good or bad about it? But one may argue saying, what about those days when we feel too lethargic and indolent that the mere act of getting out of bed is too much for us to handle? For these, all I can say is, we all have the blue days, we all have the dull days. Heck, we all even have the days when we wish the grounds will open and eat us alive.  And to seize it is to live it.

I have been thinking, maybe Carpe Diem is not only about the moments. Perhaps it is a reminder that we should live and not exist. That we should roll with the punches. That we should listen to whatever the universe is telling us. To try and capture what the stars are offering.

Now we know better, or do we really?
The college years. We all remember the days when a smile is a smile and a frown is a frown. Years after we left the academe these two became the paradigms of misinterpretations, of miscommunications, of “it’s not really what it seems”. The few years after college became the times when inhibition was the fad, and misinterpretation was more the norm than the aberration, given that a smile could be interpreted in any number of ways, some pleasant, some are not. And a frown may give you this aura of mysteriousness. An attitude that the crowd finds cool. For the rest and the few of us, college was the sowing of wild oats, the grand arena of drinking strange liquids and exchanging body fluids. It’s the years of experimentation from libidos to forbidden tryst, though these are only for the brave, the fools and the few who dared to explore beyond the limits of their imaginations. Then graduation came, soon after real life comes in. Work suddenly became a part of us. As for the sowing, I guess post-college became the dry season, the grand Sahara. The oats gone sour and the innocence was wasted on the youth.
Save for those who got hitched, but that's another story.

So we grew up.
Most of us are still confused yet no longer dazed. We are now composed yet unhinged. We all now live in a world wherein we cannot balance our act and put our shits together. We have been contradicting the norm but then maybe we never really know what the norm is in the first place. Amid the life and society that we live in, with all those stupor nights and tilted sobriety, the monotonous working lifestyle and the lackluster milieu, we are not even sure what the heck we are ranting and raving about at these age of our reasons.  We became creatures of habit. We live to face the guilt of our age.

But at the end of the day,  The innocence of my youth and the guilt of my age may not matter anymore.
What I look forward to is not to think about yesterday but to live my moments and be open on what the tides may bring.
And maybe that is my carpe diem.