Van Ree's Voice

Most mornings I am stirred awake by the loudest, most annoying alarm clock one could possibly imagine. I made it as annoying as possible for the fear that anything less would result in my inability to open my eyes and start the day, sleeping through the beginning of my workday.

Regardless of the method I use to wake up, my feelings toward removing myself from my bed stay pretty constant. I don’t want to leave, ever. I usually roll over, look at the clock, turn off the alarm and my to-do list for the day races through my mind. The whole process takes about a minute.

Sometimes I’m excited for the day, other times much less than ecstatic. Besides my daily duties and expectations, a saying usually prompts my desire to see what the day has to offer.

Every single day of school until I graduated high school my father would look me in the eye and say to me the words “Carpe Diem.”

Of course when I was younger I just thought my dad was weird. I thought he made up words that didn’t make sense and when I inquired about their meaning I got a response that I at the time could kind of understand but still found strange.

“It means do your best,” he would respond.

I remember even as young as kindergarten striving to do nothing other than my best at everything I did. I took it to a point however of attempting constant perfection, which for a 6-year-old is pretty hard to come by.

I remember crying once because I cut on the wrong dotted lines during a school project.

I also ran away from home once because I couldn’t draw a heart as good as my mother. I tried for hours and hours to make those curves perfect like commas facing each other. The first half of the heart would always show promise that I would make a semi-decent heart. But that promise was unfulfilled when I went to draw the other half and it never came out as smooth as I wanted. I cried and told my mother I was running away and she couldn’t stop me. I told her I wasn’t good enough to be her daughter. I jumped on my tricycle and my mother watched me pedal to the end of our rather long driveway, stopping at our gate for about twenty minutes.

After the 20 minutes were up, my mother was relieved as I had given up on my runaway efforts and returned somberly to the house. Though I don’t think that my father meant for my attitude toward life to become one of a perfectionist, I understood more as I got older that none of us are perfect. Even when everyone does their best people usually perform at different levels.

I also learned that “Carpe Diem” is Latin and popularly translated into “seize the day.”

Into high school I still held, as I do today, the idea that every day all we can ask of ourselves to do is our best in life. I left every ounce of energy I could out on the soccer field and stayed up most nights until the wee hours of the morning working on homework.

I guess I should thank my father. We all know we should a time or two, but usually hate to admit it. I graduated valedictorian of my class and lettered in soccer and golf every year they had the programs.

As I got in my car to head to my high school graduation to give the last speech my peers would hear as students at Rochester High School my dad stopped me.

“This is the last time I am going to say this to you. I hope you have learned over your 12 years of school enough for you to remember this yourself every day, but Carpe Diem,” he said.

I still wake up with that same notion every day to be honest. It is a reason to get out of bed. Though we all should do our best every day, I now focus more on the “seize the day” aspect.

When you wake up any given day, it’s a new day full of promise and unpredictable possibilities. You never know what could happen in a day, good or bad. But it’s worth getting out of bed and taking on the day just to find out.

Contact Hannah Van Ree at [email protected]