You’re Alive, Now What?
Stoic tactics on how to live in the present moment
Stoic tactics on how to live in the present moment
Life is short, our time is valuable.
Writing over 2000 years ago, Seneca suggested we take advantage of the knowledge and history in which we can pursue to better help us live a virtuous life and ease our burdens in the present moment. The obstacles, emotions, and situations we find ourselves in today are not all that different from what the Stoics experienced 2000 years ago. Marcus Aurelius faced war and the Antonine Plague. Seneca faced a deranged Nero. Cato went head-to-head with Julius Caesar.
It is for this reason we turn to history and philosophy in the present: to grow our wisdom and pursue virtue better than those who came before us. It is to our advantage to read, study, and grow from their lessons.
As Seneca once stated in On the Shortness of Life:
“Since nature allows us to enter into a partnership with every age, why not turn from this brief and transient spell of time and give ourselves whole-heartedly to the past, which is limitless and eternal and can be shared with better men than we?”
The Transitory Nature of Life
If 2020 has shown nothing else, it is that time marches on and is unpredictable. The idea of pursuing virtue though does not stop just because of the obstructions that stand before us.
Life is transitory. Marcus Aurelius would refer to it as an ever-flowing river, and our time within it extremely limited. Writing to himself in book six of Meditations, he writes, “If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything.”
Our time in life is not guaranteed, though we falsely like to tell ourselves it is. This year has shown that life is truly unpredictable and that at any moment, it can all be over.
Yet we still procrastinate about things. We still put off tasks to tomorrow which could be done today. We tell ourselves we will start this project when the stars align, or we will read that book just as soon as we can finish binging the latest television show.
Knowing the habits of his students, just like ourselves, Epictetus preached to his students:
“How long will you delay thinking yourself worthy of the best and making reason your decisive principle in everything?… If you are negligent now and lazy and always procrastinating, and settling on the day after tomorrow and the next as when you will take yourself in hand, you will fail to see that you are making no progress but spending your entire life as an ordinary person you die… your progress is saved or ruined by a single day and a single action.”
“A split second in eternity,” that is how Marcus describes the brief moment we are here.
So, with the limited time we have, how are we to live?
Seize The Day
Our days are numbered, and we do not know when they will cease to be. Therefore, we must take advantage of the here and now. We must act in the present moment. If we do not, we risk the regret of never truly experiencing life.
Seneca reminds us of this harsh reality in his piece On the Shortness of Life, writing:
“No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course.”
But this doesn’t have to be us, we do not have to get to the end of our lives with regrets. And this is what the pursuit of virtue is all about; you have the ability to, at any moment, pursue virtue, to become the best version of yourself that you can. But you have to balance that with the understanding that life is quick, it is ever changing, and nothing, not even how long we are here on this earth, is guaranteed.
Through consistent continuous action, though, we can live a virtuous life. Robert Greene once described this to Ryan Holiday as “Alive time versus dead time.”
It is up to us to decide how we utilize our time. When we’re sitting in traffic, will we zone out and listen to music, or will we take advantage and listen to a podcast or book which could better us?
Inaction and procrastination can lead to discontent, unhappiness, and regret. Action, even in the smallest, is progress in the right direction and leads to feelings of growth and fulfillment. And that’s ultimately what we are all in pursuit of, continuous consistent progress through daily action.
It is about that small incremental progress made each and every day. It is the continued pursuit of being good, of setting goals and achieving them, that leads us to fulfillment because we are bettering ourselves.
Create a Plan
Time and habit are powerful forces, Cicero once wrote. It is therefore to our advantage to devise a plan for our lives and our goals. Once we have that plan together, we must pursue it.
To better understand where we stand in comparison with our life pursuits, Seneca recommends we be ruthless with our daily analysis of events:
“When the daylight has faded from view, and my wife, who knows well this custom of mine, keeps quiet, I become an inspector and reexamine the course of my day, my deeds and words; I hide nothing from myself. I omit nothing. There’s no reason my mistakes should give me cause to fear, as long as I can say: “See that you don’t do that any more, but this time I forgive you… next time consider not the truth of what you say but whether the one you say it to can endure hearing the truth; good folk are glad to be chastised, but the worst sort find their preceptor very grating.”
Reverse Engineer Your Time
We all think there is more time left within our lives than there actually is. Rather than putting things off, think about how many more times you have to experience something. The number is often much lower than we actually realize. For example, if you speak to your grandmother only at holidays, how many more times will you get to hear her voice?
But even beyond this, after you take into account the fact that we all have jobs, we all have duties and obligations to attend to, once we have time to ourselves, do we really get as much time as we thought to pursue the things we want? What remains of our own time, after our jobs and daily duties, is not much. As Seneca writes:
“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.”
Learn to Say “No”
No is often thought of as combative or harsh to say to someone but the word “no” is actually the only thing you can say to reclaim what remains of your time. If we do not dictate where our time goes, someone else will. We therefore must learn to say no to some things and yes to others. This is the only way to truly extend of lives: by reclaiming our finite time.
Of the present moment, Seneca once wrote:
“The present time is extremely short, so much so that some people are unaware of it. For it is always on the move, flowing on in a rush; it ceases before it has come, and does not suffer delay any more than the firmament or the stars, whose unceasing movement never pauses in the same place. And so the preoccupied are concerned only with the present, and it is so short that it cannot be grasped, and even this is stolen from them while they are involved in their many distractions.”
Take advantage of the moment, of the present day. We do not know when it will be our last. But we can certainly take full advantage of it and strive to be better.
And if we’re given another day?
We shall once again use it to pursue virtue.
This post was originally part of The Stoic Within’s Monday Meditations. Each Monday, we send a new Stoic Meditation to help individuals conquer their week. If you wish to sign up for future Meditations delivered right to your inbox, please do so here.
This article contains affiliate links to the books I referenced. This being said, I have read and evaluated each of the books prior to my recommending them through the links within this article.