Simple Stoic Advice
There’s Enough Time
There’s Enough Time
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 Cicero from his essay on old age in the recent translation How to Grow Old:
Quote
“The time allotted to our lives may be short, but it is long enough to live honestly and decently.”
Advice
Unlike other animals, we were provided the ability to use reason and we are consciously aware of our lives. This developed gradually over the course of thousands of years of evolution. But what that means is that we are, more often than not, consciously aware that we will one day die.
And for many, this is very hard to bear. In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker talks about the fact that animals are protected by their fear response. We too have such a response to events and it can easily be brought on by the imaginings of death.
But the Stoics viewed time as an inconsequential matter because ultimately, our lives are not shaped by the amount of time we live, rather, they are measured by our actions within the time period we do have.
In other words, it doesn't matter if our lives are composed of 15 years or 100, each action we take can lead to virtue, if we allow it to.
It is not about the destination, it is about the continuous effort to live virtuously throughout all actions. Time truly is just a man made construct, but when measuring virtue in terms of actions rather than minutes, hours, or years, we learn, and the Stoics preached, we are living a deeper existence.
As Marcus Aurelius reminds himself in Meditations:
“Consider the abyss of time past, the infinite future. Three days of life or three generations: what’s the difference?”
But perhaps Seneca describes this best in his letters to Lucilius, writing:
“As it is with a play, so it is with life — what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will — only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.”
Each action taken is another opportunity to pursue virtue. Timing means little when you are present within each and every undertaking.
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