Simple Stoic Advice
It is shorter than we think
It is shorter than we think
The beautiful thing about Stoic philosophy is the advice contained within it is just as applicable today as it was when it was first written all those many years ago. We can learn a great deal from interpreting the advice provided and using it to our advantage as we go throughout our own lives.
Today’s quote comes to us courtesy of Seneca from his essay, On the Shortness of Life:
Quote
“We have to be more careful in preserving what will cease at an unknown point.”
Advice
Seneca’s most famous essay is On the Shortness of Life which details the swift nature of the world, and our lack of understanding of the passing of time. Time is our our most valuable resource yet we seldom understand this.
As children, we spend our days playing and growing, learning from our environment. As we get older, we are put into school where we are educated and then sent off into the world.
But we never truly grasp the importance of time. We’re taught about productivity and schedules. We’re provided deadlines we must meet, but what about the most important deadline, that of our lives?
“Aren’t you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end!”
-Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
We’re never really awakened to our own mortality. We end up getting into our mid or late thirties or forties where we suffer a mid-life crisis.
In The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, he states:
“when the awareness dawns [about our own mortality] that has always been blotted out by frenetic, ready-made activity, we see the transmutation of repression redistilled, so to speak, and the fear of death emerges in pure essence. This is why people have psychotic breaks when repression no longer works, when the forward momentum of activity is no longer possible.”
The irony of death is that we never know when it will come for us. That’s why these creeping feelings of dread surface the older we get, we can hear the beating of time, yet we have no visibility to the time left to each of us.
Seneca recommends we review our life and make the most of what’s left of it:
“Mark off, I tell you, and review the days of your life: you will see that very few — the useless remnants — have been left to you.”
Understand that time is an ever flowing river to an unchanging conclusion. Taking advantage of the moment and having a stern eye on the horizon helps one to prepare for life and maximize the time we have in it.
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