Seize
the Moment
“I’m
not telling you to make the world a better place, because I don’t think
progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in
it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it,
but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live
recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To
seize the moment.”
Joan
Didion (Commencement Address at UC Riverside in 1975)
Joan
Didion was one of those iconic writers who was also a human being who lived in
the real world. She described herself as a "bookish child" who received little traditional schooling because she traveled around the globe with her father's work. She remembered writing as early as five years old. She was not celebrity
material; not pretty or glamorous or self-impressed, but she trained herself to be poised through studying theater. She said in an essay
written for the New York Times Book Review in 1976: “I write to find out
what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want
and what I fear.”
In the commencement
address quoted above, she encouraged newly-minted graduates to “live
recklessly, take chances,” because to do otherwise shuts us out of the life
of the world, with all the information and lessons it can teach us. Because we
are human beings, we feel, we weep, we laugh, we love and hate, we scream and
whisper and dance. When we allow fear to stop us from any of those things, we
have lopped off some part of ourselves that is essentially human. Staying
behind closed doors so as not to feel any pain or suffering also eliminates joy
and elation. When we live in the world with open eyes, we give ourselves over
to the full array of human experience and human emotions. Why else are we here?
Writers
tend to be introverted observers. We watch, we make mental notes, we ask
questions that make people squirm, and we pry like boll weevils into other people’s
business to feed an insatiable desire to know what makes people tick. We lean
toward the world’s darkness because we can’t ignore it the way some people do. If
you walk through life with your eyes open, you will suffer, but you will also
learn compassion and understanding.
Joan
Didion did not, in 1975, believe that we would make progress toward becoming a
better human world. Perhaps she was right, but I think otherwise. I think that,
in spite of everything, we are making progress—slowly. We are gaining
consciousness, and we are bringing children into the world, who are more
conscious than we are. They are smarter, too. They will change the world
because they are justice and truth seekers.
As we
approach the New Year of 2022, let’s not make predictions of doom and gloom nor
of steady progress and sustained growth. Let’s just live in it. Let’s come out
of our houses and experience life firsthand—with all it’s joys and sorrows. Let’s
immerse ourselves in human community. Let’s take a chance.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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