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Carpe diem!

HORACE, Odes

11

Stop and Go for It!

Stopping is simple to understand. It's a period of time spent doing nothing in order to gain everything. It's taking enough time and creating enough quietude so that you can remember the important questions of your life as well as the current answers that you are bringing to them.

Stopping is a girl sitting in a sun-filled windowseat gently stroking her purring cat, a woman with an open book in her lap gazing out the window and into a distant world, a man walking barefoot along an isolated beach feeling the wind in his face, a driver poised at a stoplight taking a deep breath and relaxing with a soothing thought rather than just wishing for the light to change, a busy nurse taking a one-minute breather and then smiling at her nasty patient, and a salesman mindfully eating his lunch while sitting on a park bench and looking at the sky.

Inherent in Stopping is the idea of creating enough space in your life, whether for thirty seconds or for thirty days, to make sure that you have first things first, that you are not so distracted that you lose the moments of meaning in life, whatever else you might be in the process of gaining.

Notice the definition of Stopping is “Doing nothing as much as possible.” “Doing nothing” is a relative term here. Sometimes it will mean not doing much, doing something that takes very little energy, or doing something that you love to do. Paradoxically, doing nothing is doing something very beneficial. Again, Stopping should not be confused with inactivity; life is what it is about.

Stopping is not running from life or avoiding responsibilities. On the contrary, it is moving into life and its responsibilities in a new way. It is having the courage to go precisely where your meanings and values lie and spend time there. Stopping is like an embrace: it holds close and dear those moments which matter the most to you.

Carpe diem seems to be a popular saying these days. I've seen it on tee shirts and it often makes its way into movies. Carpe diem means “seize the day” and are the words of Horace, a Roman poet who lived just before the change of the eras (65–8 B.C.E.). Carpe diem is an encouragement to take advantage of the time you have. Contemporary equivalents might be “follow your dreams,” “don't miss the chances life gives you, you might not get any more,” “take a risk.” If you really want something, don't let anything get in the way. Have the guts to go for it!

Seize the day. Go for it. Follow your dreams. Take a risk. This encouragement to achieve and get things done was popular in the ancient times of Horace, and we are still quoting him. So what about Stopping in the face of carpe diem?—they seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. On the one end we have “stop, be quiet, take time to be spiritually awake, and remember the important things” and on the other we have “seize the day, get out and go for it, get what you want, and do it now.” Are these mutually exclusive encouragements? Not at all.

I would rather say they differ in sequence of application. In other words, before you seize anything, go for anything, dream, follow, or risk anything, you'd better know what it is you are seizing, going for, or risking. Because we have too much in our lives, we have a tendency to be impulsive, to act before we think—or better—go before we stop. It's like the executive who was so busy climbing the corporate ladder that it was only very near the top that the realization came: The ladder was leaning against the wrong wall. So before we get going, we had better start from a Stopped position or else our going, like my freshman “revolt” at Georgetown, will be inaccurately chosen, poorly carried out, unsuccessfully ended, or all three.

The combination of doing nothing and carpe diem is exactly what Stopping is all about. So with apologies to Horace, I say that we had better know what diem we want to carpe before we carpe it, or we are likely to end up with the wrong day. Before you seize the day, stop for a day.

Or even for a minute.