As a teacher I’ve been going on about the concept of carpe diem (Latin: seize the day) for ages, telling my classes that if they live to be just over 80, that equates to about 30,000 days on Earth. ‘It’s not much is it?’ I say, ‘when you discount the time you can’t remember as a baby and the possibility of being infirm later on in life.’
I can understand if I am viewed as something of a pessimist in school, but I honestly don’t mean it that way. It wasn’t until recently that I realised nobody ever talks about a life in terms of its length in days. I did a casual trawl of the net to see whether other people were discussing it. There were suprisingly few pages. However, I came this across this muse, which rather neatly sums up what I think.
In summary, time is short. To quote Red, from The Shawshank Redemption: ‘Get busy living, or get busy dying.’
This is a fascinating post, haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since I first read it!
Wow – we certainly can’t afford to be wasting any time……
Certainly puts things into perspective!