Seize your day, seize your joy

As a man of a certain age, I loved Dead Poets Society. Its swooning call to live life to the fullest of course spoke to a young LL. I don't know anyone who wasn't moved by this speech from the tzaddik Robin Williams:

I often wonder this: Have I wasted my life? Have I foolishly misspent this one, brief, glorious life we have here on this earth? And sometimes I think, yes, I have. I should have been a world-famous novelist and poet by now. I should have devoted all my energies to that goal. I remember a dream that my best friend, Marcela, had many years ago, when we were young and full of ambition. She was getting married, and wasn't sure if I'd make it. In her dream I'd returned to New York City, where I was making a name for myself in literature. And then I show up at her door, and she was over the moon. The way she described her dream gave it a reality, a physical texture for me.

Now she's sitting by her husband's bedside as he fights cancer. And I am a librarian. No jet-setting around the world. No gala dinners. No invitations to speak at colleges. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Everything in my life has led me to be the man I am today. And I'm proud of the man I am today. My mother was proud of me. I know my father, had he survived my 18th birthday, would have been proud of me. The day I collected my Master's in Library and Information Science, my mother cried. The first one in our nuclear family to have gotten a postgraduate degree. I had finally found a path in all my youthful wanderings, all my false starts. 

I wonder how different I'd be if my early dreams of literary fame had come true. Would I have strayed into that milieu and formed beliefs much different than I have now? Would I be the type of person whom we excoriate on this blog? Would I have called Kamala Harris a sell-out? Would I have been furious in my principled anti-Zionism? Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I don't know where the other one would have led me. 

Every life, if you allow it, is extraordinary. Everyone has the potential to be happy. And you don't have to be a star, to be famous, to be wealthy to be happy. Being none of those things precludes happiness, joy, contentment.

But the one thing you must do is to seize your joy. That joy can come in so many ways. It can come from finding the one person you're meant to be with. It can come by doing work of value. It can come from friends, from hobbies, from simply being present. "Joy" doesn't have to be something from the movies. Every moment can be imbued with a joy which passeth understanding. I look at my wife as we she sleeps, and I wonder if I'd go back and do my life all over again. And I would not. I have made those choices already; I do not have access to the universe in which I made different choices. 

In these dark times, we must seize the little joys life affords us. Because they're still there. As perilous as these days are, we are not in Nineteen Eighty-Four. And no, we're not in Nazi Germany, no matter how much some would wish us to be. But once we stop experiencing joy, once we stop seizing our days in ways big and small, that's when life no longer becomes worth living. That's when we are but the walking dead. That's when we've lost, and they've won.

Take every opportunity to be joyful. Leave a good report of yourself once you've gone to the place from whose bourn no traveler returns.