‘Live fully now’ by Alan Watts
My dad sent me an email this morning with a link to this new Volvo ad on YouTube. We had prior generations of Volvo stationwagons throughout my childhood, and a glossy white hand-me-down was my first car in high school.
When I called him this morning, he said something along the lines of “Pretty cool car, ey.”
I said something along the lines of “Very cool speech!”
I couldn’t find a good transcription online, so here it is (punctuation and spacing mine — I tried to follow the cadence of the original recording from 1959).
// My goodness, don’t you remember
// When you went
// First to school.// You went to Kindergarten
// And Kindergarten, the idea was to push along so that you could get to first grade.
// And then push along so that you could get to second grade, third grade, and so on going up and up.
// Then you went to high school and this was a great transition in life.// And all that pressure is being put on,
// You must get ahead.
// You must go up the grades and finally be good enough to get to college.// And then when you get to college,
// You’re still going step by step, step by step up to the great moment in which you are ready to go out into the world.
// And then when you get out into this famous world, comes
// The struggle for success and profession of business.// And then
// Suddenly
// When you’re about forty or forty-five years old in the middle of life,
// You wake up one day, and say,
// Huh?
// I’ve arrived.// And while it is of tremendous use for us to be able to look ahead and to plan,
// There is no use planning for a future,
// Which when you get to it and it becomes the present, you won’t be there.
// You will be living in some other future which hasn’t yet arrived.// And so in this way,
// One is never able actually to inherit and enjoy
// The fruits of one’s actions.// You can’t live at all,
// Unless you can live fully
// Now.- Alan Watts, philosopher, 1959.
