Living for the Moment...

One sage says, Live for the Moment:

“Our acts and thoughts and all must be determined by circumstances... Do not live by certain fixed rules, except those that relate to the cardinal virtues. Nor let your will subscribe fixed conditions, for you may have to drink the water to-morrow which you cast away to-day. There be some so absurdly paradoxical that they expect all the circumstances of an action should bend to their eccentric whims and not vice versa. The wise man knows that the very polestar of prudence lies in steering by the wind.”

Going with the flow? Not exactly. In the motion picture Yes Man (2008), Jim Carrey's character Carl Allen agrees to covenant “yes” answers to everything. This understandably gets him into situations that would be best described as ‘going against the flow.’

The quoted wisdom of Balthasar Gracian’s above is poignant in that we’re to spend our time and our ways on judiciously negotiating life without making staid, dogmatic choices based in inflexibility to some dodgy moral code.

The cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, fortitude (courage) and temperance (prudence) are the very good exception to the rule. They form for us the ‘rule of love,’ and by virtue of their stripes, create in us the value of flexibility and a correct gauge for all of life’s situations. The Seven Heavenly Virtues: faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence[1] put cardinal and theological virtues together to form “heavenly virtues.”

But, living for the moment and going with the flow of life is not about going each way without thought of tomorrow. Tomorrow always comes. In fact, what we do (or don't do) today will affect our tomorrow's.

And isn't it peculiar that the very people who're ignorantly whimsical by nature hate the eccentricities of others; we're not be like them, but bear with them with an extra seasoning of grace, as we travel the gentle ether of life, going with the flow, living for the moment.

Copyright © 2009, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

[1] Source: http://www.deadlysins.com/virtues.html