When he first said it, when he first explained it and planted it like a seed in the weirdly soft loamy soil of my young, undiagnosed autistic brain, it seemed to germinate almost instantly. Then sprout. Then poke through the mud. Then find the sunlight of my curiosity. Then blossom.
Carpe Diem, Keating said. SEIZE THE DAY, and a mantra was born.
It wasn’t just me who felt this blooming, I know this. Carpe Diem spread like a damn wildfire full of wildflowers after Dead Poets Society came out, and with it inspiration that I think stuck with so many people who were actually alive and cognizant enough at the time to absorb and embrace it.
Motivational posters, Robin Williams himself in interviews, TV talk shows, it was everywhere, seize the day, they said, take it. It’s yours, only yours. Take it. SEIZE it.
I remember the day I learned it was wrong.
Carpe never meant seize. It never meant take, not by force, not by aggression or domination. It meant something gentler, and the distinction carries with it more weight than I ever realized.
Carpe means pluck, not seize. Pluck like a single raspberry on a bush full of them, like a guitar string to play a song, like something you care enough about to bring with you, without taking it all, without breaking the whole thing in the process.
I’ve seen, more times than I can count, the ways this world is obsessed with acquisition. I see more people alive today who possess more money than they could ever spend than ever before, I see the obsession with success spread faster than I knew it possible. Owning, becoming, manifesting, optimizing, seizing, take priority over all things deemed less worthy, less valuable.
All my life I’ve watched people seize the things around them. I’ve watched them take perfect quiet mornings, the kind that come often in September, and grab them by the still chilly throats, I’ve seen them force them into productivity. I’ve watched as people grab hold tightly to the experiences they should be enjoying, and hold them up to the camera like some great fish they wrestled from the sea. Memories like trophies, days like acquisitions. I’ve not felt like this, not really ever, it’s not something my strange brain understands, and for a long time I felt like this was its own particular brand of failure. That maybe Keating would give me a forlorn look, put his chin down towards his chest, and walk off without saying a single word. Devastating me with his quiet disappointment.
To Pluck is a gentle thing, the truer translation of carpe diem something warped along the way. To pluck is soft, it’s the delicacy of a droplet of morning dew on a single strand of spiderweb, it’s the steam from my tea cup each morning. It’s a moth you reach for, that sits and rests atop your fingertip long enough to dry its wings from the brief rainstorm it just flew through. It’s the rightness of being gentle in such stark contrast to the wrongness of watching the whole world get it wrong.
As a boy, I was taught that if you want to feel a butterfly land on you, you have to stop chasing it and let it come to you. Same for trying to feed a bird, or squirrel, or any other animal my little fascinated brain latched onto as “new best friend.” Chase it, it will run, wait, be patient, be tender, and it might just come to you. They did, they still do, and it shows me every day a truth that I will defend forever and ever:
Wonder is an act that requires tenderness.
To seize is to damage, to ruin for the sake of owning, having, acquiring, controlling. To pluck is to take without destruction, to hold while preserving the wonder.
Something in me shifted when I realized this distinction. When I took the inspiration that Dead Poets gave me and let it grow, blossom, into something bigger, something more acute and important. To pluck the day is to sample it, I finally understood. It’s to remain amazed in all the day so willingly offers you. It’s to reach with gentle fingers, to lightly draw out, to pull with softness, to not harm what is before you.
Every day I see recklessness with that which sustains, I see a refusal to allow that simple grace to come. I watch and witness seizing, I tense, I feel my neck muscles go taut, my shoulders become little balls of concrete, my fingers want to roll into fists to protect me. Breathe, I say to myself, breathe, and force them to uncurl again.
With open hands I hold the little things that seek me out for protection, the bees, the flies, the moths, squirrels, or fragile flowers bent over from someone’s stepping.
This month, this time of my mind racing back to what was felt then, the flowers planted in that youthful soil, this time of some things ending though I call it beginning still, I think of this again.
Open, I think to myself, stay this way, gentle, always gentle.
Pluck.
Like string for music, like resonance from stillness.
Pluck.
Like leaving the rest behind.
Carpe Diem. Pluck the day.
I love you all.
Be good.
Should we learn to pluck
and forget about seizing,
what joy we can find.
