From that cultured world of Cambridge and Harvard, stone walls crying tradition, yellow fog, grinding poverty, purple royalty, and history layered into the street cobbles, rose a term that caught the essence of England. Carpe diem.
My English Literature teacher separated the woven strands of Carpe diem for me. A Latin term, meaning “Seize the day.” This goes beyond simply living in the moment. Take your current circumstances, and wrest from them something valuable. See the beauty already there, but make the present beautiful, if need be. Don’t let go until you’ve obtained a treasure.
In the fourteenth century in London, this hit close to home. Infants were found cold in their beds for no apparent reason. Guttersnipes scrounged in the garbage like scuttling rats. War threatened. Disease ravaged. Royalty became bored and corrupt. Everybody died comparatively young. Those left were the walking dead.
So Dickens and Shakespeare wrote. Seize the day. The morbid, but strangely electrifying implication being: We’re all terminal. Live while you can.

Jacob is a failure. His brother hunts him like a dog, his first wife is a scheming individual, his relationship with his father-in-law a compromised disaster, and now here he is. Wrestling in the dust with divinity. Night falls, suffocating. A bird shrieks; the trees move softly in the warm night air. Dust hem in the two warriors. One sweating, gasping; the other invincible.

Wrestle out a blessing.

The east lightens. The earth holds its breath in the dawn of another day.
And Jacob’s broken. Clutching his injured thigh, he holds on to the angel’s arm with a desperate grip. I won’t let go. Give me a blessing.
This is ugly. I’m messy, stained with regrets and good intentions. But I’m seizing this day, right now. I’m hurting, but I’m not letting go. You do the rest.
We don’t have long. We can’t wait until life turns better, because this may be all we have. This day holds lovely things. Just seize it, and ask for the blessings.
They’ll come.