Should we look at life in what way? In a time of emotional (dis)orders the formula for eternity is no longer a romantic idiosyncrasy. In a way no one can ask who we are, or ask us to remain the same, we simply change, evolve and even in our old dna of habits and features, there is something always mutating (even if it is just our mood). In the end it is something as simple as that: we should live each moment of the present fully.

That I firmly believe is the only thing that still can makes us immortals, (yes I believe in a kind of notion of immortality) because in that way the notion and perception of memory that we have will make sense and of course will be fulfilled. I am not saying seizing life in a way of the old “carpe diem” philosophy, once the origin source from the Latin phrase is the powerful Latin poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus known as Horace in Odes Book I:

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
Aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

which translates as:

“While we’re talking, envious time is fleeing: seize the day, put no trust in the future”

I don’t quite believe in this to be honest. I believe in seizing the day, nevertheless I believe and trust in the future as well. Funny enough I am much more motivated with the verse of Lord Byron that, curiously was the first to integrate the expression “Carpe Diem” into English in his 1817 ‘Letters’, which was published in 1830 by T. Moore:

“I never anticipate – carpe diem – the past at least is one’s own, which is one reason for making sure of the present.”

I use this way of living fully the present in the way Byron did it, precisely the “make sure of the present” is for me the challenge. That indeed is much more the way I see the contemporary challenge for humans. Of course one should never forget the mastery of Horace in his “Ars Poetica”

“Think to yourself that everyday is your last; the hour to which you do not look forward will come as a welcome surprise. As for me, when you want a good laugh, you will find me, in a fine state, fat and sleek, a true of hog of Epicurus‘ herd”

The question is how get out of the daily symptoms of inner disorders. Most of the frequent problems one has comes from the problem that one cannot simple enjoy each moment because of the “data” we stored in our behavior, wether it is the data of education, social habits, psychological scars, personality, ambition, desire of something impossible and so forth. And that difficulty to live the present as a simple formula for eternity comes straight to that existential notion of troubled soul that cannot reach something, the wander peregrine, that we think we have (at least some of us). And that impossibility of reaching our aims, of course it is what makes us meta-beings, but at the same time miserable (at least sometimes). This with the interest in conflict, with somehow a feeling of worry, a terrible fatalistic necessity to judge. Those signs and symptoms sometimes simple destroy the tendency we should have to think and act spontaneous, that old mythic fear of living.

In the other hand sometimes as a matter of fact, people becomes so cynical that it is difficult to simple believe without prejudice and it is that what provokes destabilization. In an interactive image-based media reality something remains part of being human, a deep tendency to think and act with fears based on past experiences. 

The way time goes is subjective as we all are fragile in our believes and doubts made of the data of the feelings. There is a “Magic Mountain” inside all of us and it is in that space that we build perhaps that eternity?

The formula for eternity is to create meaning and walk step by step, one at the time without judging, just believing that tomorrow is starting today at this precise moment. But of course that is not easy at all. This implies a fight for avoiding judging people, a fight to appreciate the matters of our most important gravity, the power of the acts, its contradictions in a Foucault way (the power of discourse that constrains both authorship and its utterances).

In the end we are all Ulysses, both Odysseus of Homer in an epic and crazy adventure and at the same time the character of James Joyce, Leopold Bloom in his passage through Dublin during an ordinary day. We are all inside a multu layer plot of story about life and death in a complex and simple landscape of time and space and we can indeed be our own worst enemies or… friends. The choice to get the sort of formula for “eternity”, or that if and how could we or anything survive that notion time, although hard and requiring a lot of perseverance and training it is in our side. Mainly it is about how to deal with the symptoms of inner (dis)orders.