"Fifteen there's still time for you...
Time to buy and time to lose yourself within a morning star."
"Carpe diem," kiddies. That's Latin for "seize the freakin' day."
Horace (65 B.C. - 8 B.C.): "Hey - I never said 'freakin'"...
(Quiet, you).
The ancient fella's advice is as sound as it is age-old: you've only got a finite amount of time on this planet. So don't just let life happen to you -- take a chance, roll the dice, and savor each new opportunity wherever it may be.
Coincidentally, that's also the theme of John Ondrasik's "100 Years," and it just so happens to be one of the most powerful and recurrent messages in the entire canon of Western literature. Heck, the metaphysical poets (John Donne and his ilk) created an entire sub genre dedicated to this motif waaaaay back in the 1500's -- and thus the literary world ended up with a boatload of "DO IT NOW!" poems, plays, and stories popping up all throughout the Elizabethan era and beyond.
Ahhhnold: "GET TO THE CHOPPA!!! DO IT NOW!!!"
(Oh come on -- you never saw Predator?)
Anyhow -- the "carpe diem" tradition continued well into the modern era. And for well over 2000 years, writers and thinkers of all walks of life simply couldn't help but implore their audiences to take hold of whatever moments the world might present them in order to live our finite lives to their fullest potential. Need a contemporary example? Why just ask the ridiculously talented (though recently deceased) Saul Bellow:
(Doesn't get much clearer than *that*, now does it?)
But let's get back to the song:
"100 Years" tells the story of a man looking intently at different flash points of his life (past, present, and future) and recounting how -- at each of these given moments -- the problems of the world seemed to be just so gosh-darned important and all-encompassing that he simply couldn't help but get lost in the thick of things. In short: life moves so fast that his brain can't quite ever seem to catch up. And since he's either looking ahead or looking back, it's a perpetual challenge to make sense of things as they happen.
At "fifteen?" The songwriter is "caught in-between ten and twenty," but dreaming his life away.
Taylor Swift: "Cuz' when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you / You're gonna' believe them..."
*(True story: the chorus to Taylor's "Fifteen" sounds a whole lot like Five For Fighting's "100 Years." Crazy, huh?)
At twenty two?
The balladeer is "on fire," falling in love, and wondering what the future might hold.
At thirty three?
He's got "a kid on the way" and "a family on [his] mind."
At forty five?
He's "heading through a crisis / chasing the years of [his] life."
And so on, and so on...
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855): "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward."
On and on the cycle continues until the protagonist ends up at "ninety nine, for a moment" -- and finds himself (what else?!) DREAMING his life away all over again. Except this time? He's dreaming *backwards* -- making sense of the events that brought him to that point and "dyin' for just another moment" (or more specifically, the chance to go back and enjoy each of those moments simply in their own time and for what they were).
As he says:
"Fifteen, there's never a wish better than this...It's a classic paradox of human existence: young folks dream of what life will be like when they're old, and old folks reflect on the missed opportunities of their youth. In the end, we see that life is really no more than a series of moments along the way, and thus we're implored to "seize the day" as each new wrinkle arises.
When you've only got a hundred years to live."
In other words:
"Carpe freakin' diem."
Hmmm -- this sounds oddly reminiscent of a fellow American balladeer by the name of Robert Frost:
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963): Only had just shy of a hundred years to live.
Robert Frost is likely as beloved, influential, and ballyhooed an American poet as you're likely to find. And in the (not quite) hundred years or so of the man's long and storied career, he wrote a heckuva' lot of material about making the most of life and seizing each new day as it came along. Case in point:
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."Moral of the story?
Don't sweat the small stuff, and do your best to appreciate every moment simply for what it is. But as Frost writes elsewhere -- this sort of thing is much easier said than done:
"Age saw two quiet childrenTranslation: Age bids us all to "seize the present." But there's just no getting around the fact that each new moment in life sure can be an awful lot to process when we're right there going through it.
Go loving by at twilight,
He knew not whether homeward,
Or outward from the village,
Or (chimes were ringing) churchward,
He waited, (they were strangers)
Till they were out of hearing
To bid them both be happy.
"Be happy, happy, happy,
And seize the day of pleasure."
The age-long theme is Age's.
'Twas Age imposed on poems
Their gather-roses burden
To warn against the danger
That overtaken lovers
From being overflooded
With happiness should have it.
And yet not know they have it.
But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing-
Too present to imagine."
Incidentally -- the name of this poem?
"Carpe Diem," of course.
Because when it comes right down to it, there really never was a wish better than this. After all:
"You've only got a hundred years to live."
