Carpe Diem on Bondi Beach

One of our daughters is enjoying a college semester abroad in Australia. This might seem like a boondoggle choice on her part, but it has deeper meaning in our family. My wife is Australian and both of our daughters have dual Australian and US citizenship. Unfortunately, though, we haven't made as many trips to Australia as we should have over the years, and as a result our girls' life experience isn't in sync with their DNA. Mallory's semester in Sydney, then, represents an effort on her part to make a meaningful connection to her Aussie side.

One of the advantages of being young is that you don't spend a lot of time navel-gazing about how brief and precious life is. You just live it. The downside is that it's easy, at that age, to take things for granted.

When I was in college I was privileged to be invited to spend a summer working on an archaeological dig in Italy. It was a fantastic experience, and I remember thinking that I would certainly want to make time in my adult life to do it again. But, of course, I never did. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," John Lennon once observed. It's easy to get lost in the plan-making and overlook the living. So when most of us look back on our youthful experiences from the vantage point of adulthood, we often wish we'd appreciated them more at the time.

Our daughter will likely visit Australia many times in her life. She may even choose to live there. But she doesn't seem to be taking this semester abroad for granted. In a recent e-mail home, she wrote that she was determined to "carpe diem every day, make the most of this trip and say yes to all the amazing things this place has to offer."

Good on ya, Mal.