Carpe Diem

.Whatever you do, don’t waste your youth.

Nothing makes you appreciate your youth more than 5 nights stay in hospital. 5 nights stuck in a hospital bed with no entertainment other than a stack of magazines and an old TV with only channels 1 to 5 to get me through the day. By the end of the first day I had thoroughly run bored of the TV and read the magazine’s cover to cover. What now. What to do now..

I guess the interesting thing about this particular hospital stay was my neighbour, a 76 year old Dora Porter. She seemed awfully cheery for a woman who had been confined to her hospital bed for a number of weeks, and I soon found out why, she had a load of interesting stories to share to anyone, and I mean anyone, who would stop to listen. Stories about her life, what she did, were she went and what she saw. Who needs a TV when you have a life full of memories?  It got me to thinking, maybe it’s about time to take my mum seriously whenever she would go on about ‘Carpe Diem’. Carpe Diem, yeah, yeah, ‘seize the day’ and all that, I would always think whilst sat watching the latest episode of Gossip Girls. Now I think about it though, why not? Why not seize the day?  I’m not about to suggest we all blow the rest of our overdrafts on flights around the world and go backpacking in remote areas of Thailand (although that does sound quite appealing!) I’m talking about the simple things that can happen. I have a friend who, every summer, manages to mention how he could have been the next Roger Federer if he had continued with his tennis lessons. Well, you don’t have to be Roger Federer or Andy Murray to play tennis, you don't have to be Picasso to paint and you certainly don’t have to be Beyonce to sing and dance.

It sounds oh so cliché but there is a whole world out there, sometimes; you just need to open your mind. If you can travel, go travelling, if you can dance, go dancing, if you can swim, go swimming, if you can draw, go and draw, if you can run, go running. Do things, instead of wanting to do things. It always seems harder to live with the regret of not doing something than the effort of actually doing it.  I think the best things to spend your money on are memories not things, or 'stuff'. ‘Things’ can break, become old or out of fashion, but memories, well that stuff stays with you for life.

University really is a great place to do this. Where else can you experiment with who you are and no-one will give a blind bit of notice because everyone else is doing the exact same thing aswell?

‘Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing... And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.'