Carpe Diem

 

 

 

“…When it's over, I want to say: all my life 

I was a bride married to amazement. 

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms….” – Mary Oliver

 

"Carpe diem” means ‘seize the day’ but I am saying to ‘seize the moment’. With so much unknown about the future with climate warming, floods, fire, earthquakes, drought; with diseases rampant around the world; we just do not know what can be next; the future cannot be determined.  There is great conflict within families, within communities, within provinces and states, and within countries, who can even try to guess what is coming up.  We have to take care of knowing the lessons we have learned (the hard way, most times) and making the changes to be open-minded yet educated, of realizing not all things are either all good or all bad, and learn to forgive ourselves for not always knowing.  We need to slow down and listen and become even more empathetic to those we can not understand the reasons for their positions.  Adversity is rampant in all our lives, stress is great, and, although we are survivors, we do not know what will come that we will find challenging more than we have ever been challenged before.  Everything has changed.  We have changed.  We can only control ourselves and how we allow things to change us.  We need to make sure we know what is virtuous and how we reflect our virtues.  What means the most to us amidst all this?

We have changed and our values have changed, or we have become more micro-intro-perspective in all this.  What we have begun to use our time for has changed.  We have choice in what we do for each day, whether it is work, or retirement, or what we do with our free time.  We need to make sure we are deliberate and intentional with our 24 hours a day, every day, to make sure we are seizing the day and the moments.  We all, desperately need to feel we have a purpose, that we gain some sense of fulfilment for those hours, never mind for the rest of our life. Somehow we need to be open to new adventures, experiences, and allow for moments of ah, awe, and awwww.  It is all about attitude right now.

We have been shoved out of our comfort zones.  We are all feeling strange, bewildered, lost, and awkward.  It makes us be ‘in the Present’ because from moment to moment things change, people change, places change.  For instance, right now we can not take any highways to the North, to the west and to the East because of fire road closures.  The health organizations are saying that we have to stay out of the smoke, which makes us even more housebound.  First it was covid, now it is the toxic smoke.  They are saying that this is the new norm and that the elderly and vulnerable need to move out for the two months of summer fires and smoke that will be our new norm.  But they say that, and half of Canada is in smoke, the North is in smoke, the south of us is in smoke.  Where would one go since the borders are closed and south is not the answer either?   

Our bees are only making dark honey and little of it.  My little flower garden thinks it is fall and only a few are still trying to be summer.  Our forest are all on fire so camping and vacationing there is not an option.  Our motorhome is fueled and ready to go if we have to evacuate (to where, no one knows). Since we cannot be out in nature, where so many of us find our peace and comfort, we have to find our beauty within. Reading, cleaning, making beauty within our home is suddenly most boring.  I tried.  I am learning to savor silence of creating, though, and so I return to my dining table throughout the day to try to find some peace there.  (All my work to set up and art studio out in the gazebo is a no go.  Can’t be out there.  Cannot breathe.)  Now is the time to find things that can be done to create, not just beauty, but a sense of peace and fulfillment.  Finding something that soothes the soul is adamant. 

Making every moment count for something (even if it is a rejuvenating nap) is something to be developed.  I do a lot of research on topics that I find interesting or have wondered about.  Journaling helps me know and record how I am changing and what it is worth for the moments I do so.  Mary Oliver wrote a poem that really speaks to me about this:

Poem 102

When death comes 

like the hungry bear in autumn; 

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; 

when death comes 

like the measle-pox;

when death comes 

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: 

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything 

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, 

and I look upon time as no more than an idea, 

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common 

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, 

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something 

precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life 

I was a bride married to amazement. 

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder 

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

—Mary Oliver

 

How are you applying carpe diem to your life?

 

©Carol Desjarlais  8.4.21

****Another textile art journal page

Repository

 

 

 

“It’s more important for people, for survival, to notice the lion in the brush than it is to notice the beautiful flower that’s growing on the other side of the way,” - Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor at Stanford University

If you think about it, do you tend to remember negative experiences and comments, in your past, rather than more of the positive ones?  How do we regain a different perspective of our repository of memories of our past?

Again, we can look at what our amygdala has been up to all our life.  Perceived fear and sadness can be distorted and misread by that Lizard part of our brain.  (“Reptilian brain includes the main structures found in a reptile's brain: the brainstem and the cerebellum. The reptilian brain is reliable but tends to be somewhat rigid and compulsive. ... The main structures of the limbic brain are the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus.” – McGill.ca) We, as human beings, have evolved but that part of our brain is still in the early stages of being dumped in a life-threatening foreign space and place and was meant top be protection during this time.  Our Lizard Brain is still living in those times and is trying to protect us, this we notice scary and threatening things because of this and some tend not to forget them.  It is still in survival mode and we are supposed to remember those things in order for us to remember what threats were.

It is also that women tend to internalize things and express them in either sadness or regret at different levels of such.  Men, they say, react with protective rage. Like earliest stories around a cam[fire, we share and discuss these things and learn from ‘our tribe’ about how we should be wary and take care and accept defined negative things that happen.  This, then, begins the story of our lives.

It takes a great deal of effort to dampen down this part of our brain and retrain it to see that not all perceived threats are life-threatening and we need not store such memories.  We need to take another look at what we have stored that were NOT life-threatening.  Once I was prone to ask a crying one of my children, who did not get their way,  if they were bleeding to death, if not, then I would say, “whew, you are going to live” but I never took my own information to heart, rather, to brain.  There is more to the trite phrase about being grateful, about stopping and seeing the positive things more.  Some days these positives might hardly be noticeable, but, if we seek them out, we will find them:  what we expect we get.   So, what can we do to change how we input memories?

When you notice a negative memory or response, break our pattern of seeing EVERYTHING as negative.  Weigh it:  Are you bleeding, are your guts hanging out?  Then, we are probably going to live through it.  If you have to analyze a situation, stop and think about how little a situation does in the whole of your story. I can tell you that I have been grateful for many negatives in my life because it made me better at my career.  You see, little kids did not have to say all the words.  I knew them already.  I knew the look on the face of a teenaged girl who had had a horrible experience.  I knew the drooping sadness of women.  I was there once.  They did not, as I said, need all the words.  It made me better at my career to be able to recognize signals of desperation, of depression, of negative experiences they might have had.   I know my courage and bravery by many parts of my story.  I survived.  I overcame.  I have thrived.  I know how to balance our negatives with positive things; like getting up out of my worrying bed and doing something that pleases me;  arting, creating.  Do I have all my proverbial ‘chite’ together?  Of course not.  I still forage for comfort food when I might feel negatives seeping in.  Sometimes I over-react.  Sometimes, I allow myself to be influenced by a moment or two and I have to do some serious self-talk. 

You know how you always think of something you could have said or done, after the danged fact?  Well, that is your cue to learn a new way of coping.  Those things you wish you had done, typically, not always, are the best way to deal with negative situations in the future.  I have spent a great deal of time substituting my own negative self-talk with positive talk.  When we wish we had done or said something different, take that wish and make it a reality when you meet the same kind of situation.  Sometimes we need to take the perspective of our own best friend.  How would we talk to our best friend if they were feeling, reacting, to a negative situation?  We would ask them if they were okay.  We would aske them what has happened.  We would ask them to explain exactly what happened and why they were feeling negative.  Then we would talk to them in the kindest, most compassionate way to help them get through.  Why don’t we do that for ourselves?  For goodness sakes, we have to love ourselves because we are the only one who really counts.  Be patient with yourself.  It takes time; sometimes, a long time.  We are conditioned and we must recondition our thinking and our sensory memory storage. 

Remember this above all things:  “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”  - Eleanor Roosevelt. 

If you, like me, are working on all this, be kind to yourself.  Life is hard enough without bullying yourself.  Remember: “I love you.  I forgive you.  I love myself!” (a main phrase in the story of my life) Let’s check our repository.

©Carol Desjarlais 8.3.21

 ***the art journal page, here, is one using vellum.  I struggle with its use.