Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  So I’m sorry to say it, but it might be difficult for Westerners to grab some Brazilian spontaneity for themselves: this melange of social and historical forces cannot be invented out of thin air. You could try living in Brazil for a while and see if it starts rubbing off on you, but you will probably be hard-pushed to import it to your high-velocity, über-planned homeland. This might all sound rather disheartening. Yet there is a message of hope in it all. On an individual level we can make an effort to defy our own social traditions and develop new habits that bring more improvisation into our lives. Having spent more than a decade teaching workshops on creative living, I think there are two practical steps we can take to encourage our spontaneous selves and become, in our own ways, just a little bit Brazilian. They are captured by a single slogan: The Plan Is There Is No Plan.

  The first thing to do is take out your diary or calendar and schedule in regular time for spontaneous living. So you might block out from 2pm to 6pm every Sunday afternoon, where you resolutely make no plans at all. When 2pm on Sunday arrives, that’s when you decide what to do. It could be anything from baking a cake with your kids for a new neighbour or taking a sketch pad to the park, to turning up at the cinema and seeing whatever is on. The key is to do something a little out of your ordinary routine. This is an opportunity to nurture your inner Brazilian. Scheduling in spontaneity might appear artificial, but it’s an effective strategy in a world where endless commitments can easily leave us gasping for free time that may never arrive. I consider it deliciously subversive: it’s using the scheduled structure of a diary against the culture of scheduling itself.

  The author’s Tiny Diary, an unlikely source of spontaneous living.

  I take it a step further by having a diary that is so tiny – less than half a little finger allocated to each day – that I can barely write in more than one or two daily activities or meetings. It sounds ridiculous but I swear it means my week doesn’t get cluttered and I have more time for impromptu living.

  A second approach is to engage in experimental travel. Ever since Karl Baedeker invented the travel guide in the 1830s, many people have allowed the standard guides to determine their holiday itineraries.33 It is common to arrive in a new city and immediately bring out a Lonely Planet or log on to TripAdvisor in search of the Top Ten Things To Do, and then to follow the maps and take in the requisite sites, views, cathedrals and museums. Yet there is a growing trend of taking a more experimental, spontaneous approach to travel, similar to that favoured by the character of Eleanor Lavish in the Edwardian-era film A Room with a View. When Miss Lavish and her friend are lost in the back streets of Florence, she admonishes her companion who starts bringing out her guidebook: ‘No, Miss Bartlett, you will not look into your Baedeker. Two lone females in an unknown city, that’s what I call an adventure. We will simply drift.’ A moment later, as they pass by a group of young men, she suddenly stops, closes her eyes and inhales deeply. ‘The smell! A true Florentine smell – inhale, my dear,’ she says in a kind of ecstasy. ‘Every city, let me tell you, has its own smell.’34

  Today’s carpe diem travellers take their cue from Miss Lavish and do things like devising sensory itineraries, where they might spend a whole day following smells or sounds, and seeing where they end up. Or they may jump on random buses to unknown destinations, or talk to strangers wearing hats, or take every second turn, or draw a love heart on a map and walk its route. The point of doing so is not simply to break with the Baedeker tradition; it is to start developing the habit of improvised, unplanned living. Once you try it on a holiday, you might start bringing it into your regular life, from the way you walk to work or manage meetings at the office, to the way you choose food on a menu.

  Experimental travel is a stepping stone to a more seize-the-day existence. Ultimately we may not need to visit Brazil. We can simply kindle our spontaneity by experimenting with how we travel through our daily lives.

  PUT YOUR LIFE TO MUSIC

  We now have three tools at our disposal to take spontaneity beyond impulsive shopping sprees and last-minute socialising that acts as a veil for non-commitment. We can practise (and practise and practise) crafts or skills – like art, music or sport – as a route to releasing spontaneous invention. We can strive to use everything and accept the offers, so we become more open, aware and ready to be creatively sparked by the world around us. And we can directly stand up to the tyranny of the timetable by consciously planning freedom into our lives.

  In doing so, we are honouring Horace by reclaiming the spirit of carpe diem that has been hijacked over the centuries. We should, however, approach spontaneity with a touch of moderation. This is not only because impulsive responses might be morally reprehensible or inappropriate, for instance an outburst of spontaneous anger or a snap cutting putdown of a colleague. It is also because order has its place in human affairs. Gustave Flaubert advised, ‘be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work’. We all need a dose of planning and organisation to steady our lives and keep them grounded. Continuous spontaneity would be both exhausting and also unwise: in both a literal and metaphorical sense, I wouldn’t recommend buying a house on a whim without first getting a surveyor to check the foundations.

  Last night I watched my seven-year-old son perform as a worker bee in a contemporary dance show. He buzzed around the stage with twenty other little bees dressed in black with yellow stripes on their shirts and homemade wings on their backs. He looked completely absorbed and utterly unselfconscious. He was free. He was spontaneous. It was beautiful. I was envious of the children, and also of the parents who took part in it too. Afterwards, I watched an online talk by his inspiring dance teacher, Cecilia Macfarlane, founder of Oxford Youth Dance, whose philosophy is based on encouraging spontaneity and creativity amongst everyone she works with, from schoolchildren to prisoners and people in hospices. ‘I believe my last dance will be my last blink, because any movement is a dance,’ she told the audience. She continued:

  If you think dance is the thing that you do if you can do splits or if your hair is in a bun, I have spent my life rule-breaking and changing those stereotypes. Most of you in this room have probably said ‘I’m no good at dance, I can’t dance’. But you’re all dancers because you just got up for coffee and sat down again. If you’d done that in silence, with a lovely piece of music, we’d have seen the whole room dancing… I’m passionate about dance. If you can find a passion, and ownership of your passion, break rules please, and celebrate your individuality and uniqueness.35

  I’m one of those people who say, ‘I’m no good at dance, I can’t dance.’ My son’s performance was an offer. I think it’s time I joined him on the dance floor and got some spontaneous freedom buzzing through my body.

  Notes

  1 http://www.tikit.com/software/time-capture/

  2 Smith-Laing, Whalen and Krznaric 2015.

  3 http://rwe.org/chapter-vii-works-and-days/

  4 Emerson 1995, 33.

  5 http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/14/britons-learned-art-last-minute-living; http://lastminutecareers.com/spontaneity/

  6 Przybylski et al 2013, 1841.

  7 http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/07/think-you-act-against-modern-cult-spontaneity

  8 Przybylski et al 2013, 1846; http://mashable.com/2013/07/09/fear-of-missing-out/#vCQ.8vfMpaqB

  9 Przybylski et al 2013, 1841, 1845.

  10 Krznaric 2011, 7.

  11 Fromm 1960, 222–223.

  12 Berger 1965, 11.

  13 Staller 2001, 6.

  14 http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/29/arts/organ-improvisation-as-an-art-form.html

  15 This is similar to the idea of ‘trained spontaneity’, which appears in early Chinese thought (Puett and Gross-Loh 2016, 146).

  16 Vasari 2008, 425.

  17 Krznaric 2011, 253–279.

  18 Johnstone 2007, 96.

  19 Johnstone 2007, 92, 95.

  20 Poynton 2013, 17.

>   21 Poynton 2013, 20.

  22 Poynton 2013, 28.

  23 Johnstone 2007, 99.

  24 Hemingway 2000, 9.

  25 Gannon and Pillai 2013, 559.

  26 Levine 2006, 131–132.

  27 Gannon and Pillai 2013, 558.

  28 Quoted in Foster (2003, 74).

  29 Quoted in Foster (2003, 81).

  30 Mason 1995, 123–124; Foster 2003, 73.

  31 http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/menezes-sets-brazil-quest-for-old-style-7466751.html

  32 Robb 2004, 22–29.

  33 Krznaric 2011, 186.

  34 http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/r/room-with-a-view-script.html

  35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZsj8yuaBKA

  8

  Just Doing It Together

  June 18th, 1999. I was sitting quietly in the British Library in London, dutifully working on my politics doctoral thesis, when a friend approached with a flyer calling me to a different kind of politics. It was an invitation to a ‘Carnival Against Capitalism’ at noon that day at Liverpool Street Station, promising a ‘global street party’ to protest against the corporate-fuelled neoliberal economics championed by the wealthy G8 nations, whose 25th Annual Summit was opening the same day in Germany. How could we resist such as opportunity? It was nearly noon, so we spontaneously decided to abandon our books and jumped on the Tube.

  We emerged into a completely transformed station. The concourse was packed with thousands of young people bopping to the beat of a Brazilian samba band. A gigantic blow-up Planet Earth was being tossed around above this human sea, with whoops and shouts as it landed on a new part of the crowd. People wearing Venetian-style carnival masks were handing out copies of a mock edition of the Evening Standard newspaper called Evading Standards, announcing a ‘Global Market Meltdown’ on the front page. They then started giving out masks in four different colours. We were instructed to ‘follow your colour’, and surged out of the station in four different directions, each group dominated by red, green, black or gold masked revellers. Soon we were dancing down the streets of the city’s financial heartland, banners waving, the masks offering both a sense of freedom and anonymity from CCTV cameras and the police. We were immersed in the rhythmic pulse of the drums and exuberant festival spirit, while bemused office workers watched us pass by, clearly wondering what the party was all about. Each of the four groups snaked past the banks and insurance companies, dodging and weaving through the streets to avoid the police cordons.

  By around 2pm we’d finally reassembled on the wide avenue of Lower Thames Street. While some protesters converged on the nearby London International Financial Futures Exchange, where they attempted (but failed) to occupy the trading floor, my friend and I joined the thousands who were sitting in the middle of the road having impromptu picnics and dancing to the bands that had suddenly appeared on a makeshift stage. Cyclists from the Critical Mass movement were riding about amongst an array of huge walking puppets and the occasional naked eco-activist or intrepid pinstriped financier. All work had stopped, the clocks seemed to stand still, and the carnival continued into the long summer evening. I spotted a banner that read ‘The Earth Is a Common Treasury For All’ – a quote from the seventeenth-century radical Gerrard Winstanley. For those few hours, as we reclaimed the streets, it really did feel like the celebration of a common treasury.

  J18, as it has come to be known, didn’t just happen in London: there were protests that day in forty countries. Ten thousand people marched in Port Harcourt in Nigeria. South Korean activists dressed up as Zapatista rebel Subcomandante Marcos. In Barcelona they playfully revived the slogan used by Paris students in 1968, ‘Sous les paves, la plage’ (‘Under the pavement, the beach’), by wearing swimsuits and sunbathing on the roads.

  It was the birth of the Global Justice Movement, a wave of protests targeting the behemoths of transnational capitalism – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and G8 – which captured the streets of cities such as Seattle, Genoa and Prague over the following four years, frequently in the face of club-wielding riot police.1

  THE POLITICS OF SEIZING THE DAY

  The Global Justice Movement was a powerful example of what I call ‘carpe diem politics’, a term that cannot be found in any political science textbook, but I believe deserves to be there. What exactly is it? I define it as a strategy for political change based on mass popular mobilisation, which harnesses the four forms of seizing the day – opportunity, hedonism, presence and spontaneity – to achieve political influence. Each of these four types of carpe diem was evident at J18, which was not just a street protest brimming with spontaneity, but embodied hedonistic revelry, brought its participants into the present moment, and was an effort to grasp a window of political opportunity. Of course, politics has always involved people trying to seize opportunities – think of Boris Johnson deciding at the last minute to back the ‘leave’ campaign in the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union, and his accomplice Michael Gove then stabbing him in the back in a (failed) effort to become leader of the Conservative Party. The difference with carpe diem politics is that all four modes of seizing the day are brought together on a mass scale to create change. As such, it constitutes a distinct, fifth approach to Horace’s original ideal, where we don’t ‘just do it’ but ‘just do it together’.

  Carpe diem politics is a strategy most often used by social movements that engage in large-scale collective action, rather than political parties that focus more on electoral politics – although traditional parties will sometimes employ it when mobilising their popular support base. So it is much more about seizing the people’s streets than the political seats. It is also a politically neutral concept, in the sense that movements across the political spectrum might conceivably draw on its potential: while carpe diem politics was evident in the anti-capitalist Global Justice Movement and the pro-democracy Hong Kong ‘Umbrella Revolution’, it has also been visible in the strategies of the conservative Tea Party movement in the US and the far-right Golden Dawn organisation in Greece.

  Social movement protest is not the only way that political change happens. Political parties, electoral alliances, interest-group lobbying, media strategies, ideological shifts and many other factors all play a role. We should, however, remember a well-known lesson of history: pressure from mass movements on the ground has often been a fundamental force in creating substantive political transformation.2 The New Deal in the 1930s, for instance, was not the gift of benign US politicians: it was forced on them by a groundswell of public protests by unemployed workers, war veterans and even street marches by starving children, who were rebelling in the face of the destitution created by the Depression.3 As the social anthropologist James Scott reminds us, ‘the great emancipatory gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below.’4

  This is precisely what we are starting to witness today. As we are about to discover, over the past decade there has been a dramatic upsurge of social movement action on a global scale that has tapped into the power of carpe diem to shift the political landscape, and has engaged a new generation in public life. Although facing challenges – including a reliance on digitally generated mobilisation that may be short-lived – it has been remarkably effective in many countries. And if you have any doubts about the potential of such movements to shake up politics, recall a wall that stood as the symbolic dividing line of the Cold War for nearly thirty years.

  1989: A CARNIVAL OF REVOLUTION

  Around 8pm on Thursday, November 9th, 1989, crowds began gathering at the Bornholmer Street border crossing in East Berlin. There was a rumour, based on a press conference announcement earlier that evening, that the East German government would allow its citizens to freely cross into the West. More and more people started pouring out of their homes and local bars, and headed for the border. By 11pm, the cr
owd had grown into the tens of thousands, despite frantic government TV and police announcements that visas would still be required to cross. The border guards at Bornholmer Street, completely unprepared, looked on in horror as people began to chant, ‘Open the gate! Open the gate!’ Finally, just before 11.30pm, the head guard, Harald Jäger, realised they could no longer contain the increasingly agitated assemblage, and the main gate was opened.5

  Juggling on Berlin Wall, November 16th, 1989.

  Jubilant East Berliners began streaming across. Video footage soon sped around the world showing them cheering, crying and embracing as they reached the other side. Champagne seemed to appear from nowhere and there was dancing in the streets. There were similar scenes at other border posts throughout the city. With the breaching of the Berlin Wall, suddenly one of the most repressive regimes of the Eastern Bloc, notorious for its secret police – the Stasi – which seemed to infiltrate every aspect of people’s lives, had effectively crumbled. It was the emblematic moment when the dreams of the revolutionaries of October 1917 were finally shattered and the Cold War was over.