In one of the best high school movies of all time, there’s a famous scene where John Keating, a teacher of English at prestigious Welton Academy, brings his students into the school’s trophy room. As the students look at pictures of former Welton students, Keating has them repeat the words, carpe diem – ‘seize the day.’

Following this scene, the rest of the movie is a process of awakening. For these young boys, ‘seizing the day’ leads them to search for their own identity apart from that which has merely been handed down to them from their elders.

Unfortunately, the film, Dead Poets Society, ends in tragedy, as one student commits suicide and several others are expelled from Welton. In one sense, the film tells the story of youthful idealism gone too far. But at the same time, I can’t help but wonder if there is something to ‘seizing the day.’

Though the phrase, carpe diem, has been made popular–- and even cliché -–by poetry, music, and movies throughout the last two millennia, the phrase actually originated in an ode by Horace.

Leuconoe, don’t ask — it’s forbidden to know —

what end the gods will give me or you. Don’t play with Babylonian

fortune-telling either. Better just deal with whatever comes your way.

Whether you’ll see several more winters or whether the last one

Jupiter gives you is the one even now pelting the rocks on the shore with the waves

of the Tyrrhenian sea–be smart, drink your wine. Scale back your long hopes

to a short period. Even as we speak, envious time

is running away from us. Seize the day, for in the future you can believe the minimum.

Read in the context of the ode, the phrase is not so much an excuse to pursue whatever path one wishes to follow. Instead, it is a reminder that our existence is mutable, that time is forever hurrying ahead, and that if we do not chase our opportunities they will slip away from us.

As a senior it feels like my time at Trinity is running away from me. Thinking back on my time here, I am reminded of a phrase from the confession prayer in the Anglican liturgy, in which we are asked to consider what we have done and what we have left undone.

Over the last four years, I’ve been involved in three different types of student leadership (including, of course, Mars’ Hill), I joined two clubs, and I even managed to get my MRS degree.

Unfortunately, my list of things that I have left ‘undone’ is considerably longer. After taking POLS 101 in first year, I determined that by the time I graduated I would take Townsend’s RELS 465 class; sadly, I never did. In my second year, a friend and I planned to start an underground newspaper called The Boilermaker, but despite our passion for the ‘unprintable,’ it never came to fruition. I began last year with great hopes of starting a literary journal, but because of other responsibilities, I did not make time to get it off the ground (thankfully, some creative English students did get it going this year).

As university-attending twenty-somethings, we are currently living out some of the best years of our lives. Because we are tied to relatively few responsibilities, we have both the time and the freedom to do those things that we’ve always wanted to do – we can start that club, go on that road trip, write that article, take that risk.

Our time is short. In only a few years, we’ll be tied down to jobs, to mortgages, to children. And if we’re not, we’ll probably be too cynical – if we aren’t already – to do anything about our dreams.

Don’t let your youthful idealism go to waste. Make your mark. Seize the day.