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The Case for Regrets
To regret nothing is to have never grown up
I don’t know when I first learned the Latin phrase carpe diem. I know it was before the phrase was a major theme in the 1989 Robin Williams movie Dead Poets Society. Carpe diem — seize the day — was in the zeitgeist during my teenage years.
I learned carpe diem before my friends and I sat in the lobby of an orthodontist's office one Friday night, waiting for Eric to finish his evening cleaning duties at the place where his mom worked as an office manager. This was the only kind of nepotism we experienced in our social circle.
Eric came out from the back with a white box, gleefully telling Chip he was holding Robyn’s dental impressions. Chip grabbed the box, pulled out a plaster mold of Robyn’s teeth, raised it above his head as if it was Excalibur, and proclaimed, “Carpe dentum!” — sending us all sprawling with laughter.
Eric asked for the box back, but it had somehow disappeared. We high school boys may have all known a single Latin phrase, but none of us understood medical privacy. (HIPAA was still two years away from becoming the law of the land.)
In today’s youth-centric culture, you rarely hear that dusty Latin phrase. It’s largely been replaced with YOLO — you only live once. In some circles, you also hear two words that make me…
