There is a scene in Closer, the Mike Nichols film, the one that makes you feel slightly winded for days afterwards, where two people meet because of an accident. A street. A glance. A moment of distraction at exactly the wrong time. And from that collision, everything changes. Lives reroute. Love happens and then doesn't. People destroy each other and are grateful for it.
The whole film is a study in contingency. In the terrifying, exhilarating randomness of how things begin.
It is also, if you look at it a certain way, an argument for showing up. For being on the street. For not staying home.
The Japanese have a concept called ichigo ichie: one time, one meeting. The idea that every encounter is singular and unrepeatable, and should be treated as such. You will never have this conversation again. This meal. This afternoon. The Buddhist traditions built entire philosophies around impermanence, not as tragedy but as instruction. The Stoics had memento mori, meaning, remember that you will die, not to depress you but to sharpen your attention. The Italians, more practically, have dolce far niente: the sweetness of doing nothing, which only works if you are genuinely, fully present for the nothing.
Every culture has found its own language for the same essential truth: it goes fast, and most of us are not paying enough attention.
We talk about carpe diem as though it is a motivational poster. Seize the day. Get after it. But the original Horace is stranger and more interesting than that. The full line is carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow. It is not optimism exactly. It is a clear-eyed acknowledgement that tomorrow is not guaranteed, paired with the instruction to do something about that today. Not frantically. Not performatively. Just actually. Really. Now.
There is a kind of person who lives like this naturally. Not because they are reckless or naïve, but because they have genuinely metabolised the fact that time is finite and interesting things are available. They say yes when it's inconvenient. They book the trip. They start the thing. They are, almost always, more fun to be around than the rest of us.
My father is one of these people. He has lived his whole life with a particular brand of optimism that is not the absence of difficulty, it is the deliberate refusal to let difficulty be the loudest thing in the room. He tells good stories. He has always made the most of what was in front of him. He is, in the truest sense, someone who shows up.
He told me a story once, a strange, funny, slightly chaotic story from the 1960s, involving a beach and a woman and a bikini produced from a matchbox and I turned it into a business. That is what happens when you actually listen to the people in your life. When you pay attention. Moments are everywhere. Most of them go unnoticed.
The ships in Closer pass. That is the whole point. Dan meets Alice because of a second's difference in timing. Had she stepped off the kerb a moment earlier, nothing. The whole story, the love, the damage, the transformation exists because of an accident. Nichols doesn't frame this as lucky or unlucky. He frames it as life. As the texture of how things actually happen, if you're honest about it.
We like to believe our lives are shaped by intention. By planning and decisions and the careful management of outcomes. And they are, partly. But they are also shaped by who happened to be on the street that afternoon. By the conversation you almost didn't have. By the story someone told you that you nearly forgot.
Which is an argument, if you need one, for staying curious. For not waiting until conditions are perfect, because conditions are never perfect and the moment will not hold. For listening properly when someone older and wiser than you tells you something strange that happened to them once.
You will not pass this way again.
Ichigo ichie. One time, one meeting.
MAKE IT COUNT.
