Memento vivere

I've been spending time on a cool project at work the last few days. I'm scanning photos and editing a video to be played at Blair's celebration party that's coming up Sunday afternoon. The photo scanning has been fascinating - I've been learning a lot about him and his family, and it's impressive to see how well they documented the good times. One of the coolest photos (I wish I had it here to post) shows Blair on a beach, and you can see the tattoo he had on his left bicep. It was just plain text, and it said "MEMENTO VIVERE". Not being well-versed in Latin (I only took it in 8th grade), I had to look it up - the literal translation is "remember to live".

A simple reminder of something that is so easy to lose sight of. For me, it's incredibly easy to get distracted by the day to day routine, doing the things that need to be done to pay the bills. Lulled into a trance that keeps me from taking the crazy tangents or even the minor sidetracks that are the adventure in life.

Fear has something to do with that, too. To fully invest my heart and soul into something that's not a sure-win scares me back into the safe cave of inaction. Looking back in my history, there just aren't many times when I have taken a chance and put everything I've got into something I cared about. It goes deeper than "you get out of it what you put into it", but that's some of it.

I suspect these thoughts that are a minor revelation to me are common sense to everyone else. The older I get, the more I know that there is an infinite supply of that which I do not know. This little gem, "remember to live", is one that I am glad I learned and desperately want to put into action. Now I just have to figure out how to do it.