I long to carpe diem! I have a busy life, a loving partner and good friends but, despite looking forward to holidays or events, when I am in them I feel unable to relax and enjoy.
I constantly think about work or my daughter or my elderly mum or, most dully, my pension. I know people notice. And it’s not just an obvious checking of my phone, I feel it’s a vacantness behind the eyes. How can I be more present?
Eleanor says: Assuming this isn’t a sign of a larger mental health experience, I think to some extent everybody feels the same. I remember being floored by a poem by Marie Howe, a line from it reads: “My days and nights pour through me like complaints and become a story I forgot to tell.”
What’s standing in the way? Why does it feel so hard to carpe our remaining diems?
You mention feeling constantly diverted, having your attention pulled towards work and your mum, your daughter and pension. Those are important things to think about. It doesn’t sound as though the problem is that your attention gets yanked around by screens, TV, social media. You describe being pulled out of the now by things you care about, not just being pulled into nothing, not-here.
That might be the beginning of the answer. Does some part of you feel obliged to stay mentally tethered to those things? Is that how you show you care about them, or how you reassure yourself? Do you feel you have licence to set them aside for a bit or would that feel bad, scary, or as if you weren’t doing enough?
For lots of us deliberating over something, or going back again and again to some question about it, is part of how we express its value to us. Especially when some aspect of it is outside our control, some of us cope by going back to it in thought, turning it over and over like a pebble going smooth from all the handling.
I don’t claim to know the answer to changing these patterns; that is a question for therapists or introspection. But I think it’s worth asking not just how to seize the day but why exactly we’re not. For some of us it’s just the aggregate of being busy, tired, screensick. For others it’s not just that we forget to be present but that setting down our worries to do so feels scary or insubordinate.
If what you need is not just tactics for carpe-ing but also permission, therapy can really help.
It can also help to be led by what you want; what you’d feel like doing on an unexpectedly free afternoon. Carpe diem gets so hyped up as the secret to life, dressed up in Latin and carved on to tombstones, that it can feel as though it has to be a very big deal. That, of course, can in turn make it feel like just another task to fail at.
But presence doesn’t have to look like meditation or communion with nature or some profound insight into the universe. It can just be a calm appreciation of whatever you cherish. A chilly morning, a moment singing, the smell of a person you love.
It’s too easy to want (and then beat ourselves up for not having) a particular set of feelings about “the now”. But the first step to being in it is openness to it. Noticing it, actually feeling it. There’s a long way to go before loving it or being grateful for it but we won’t get there without first unbarring the door.
