But here’s the thing: you already have a terminal diagnosis – we all do... every person is born with a death sentence; each second that passes by is one you’ll never get back.
Instead of denying our fear of death, let’s let it make us the best people we can be. Today.
In one of Hemingway’s most beautiful passages, he writes: If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
You can’t let this period make you bitter. You have to make sure it makes you better.
Education – reading and meditating on the wisdom of great minds – is not to be done for its own sake. It has a purpose.
Can you trust that if you put in the effort, the rest will take care of itself? Because it will. Love the craft, be a craftsman.
The virtues are like music. They vibrate at a higher, nobler pitch. Steven Pressfield.
Our reasoned choice – our ‘prohairesis,’ as the stoics called it – is a kind of invincibility that we can cultivate. We can shrug off hostile attacks and breeze through pressure and problems.
Cheerfulness is surface-level. Joy, to Seneca, is a deep state of being... can you be fully content with your life... can you bounce back from every kind of adversity without losing a step?
The goodness inside you is like a small flame, and you are its keeper. It’s your job, today and every day, to make sure that it has enough fuel... every person has their own version of the flame... so long as your flame flickers, there will be some light in the world.
Florence Nightingale saying, recorded on a wax tablet at the end of her life, “I hope that my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life.
So it’s not so clear that power always corrupts. In fact, it looks like it comes down, in many ways, to the inner strength and self-awareness of individuals – what they value, what desires they keep in check, whether their understanding of fairness and justice can counteract the temptations of unlimited wealth and deference.
Do we sit down, alone, and struggle with our work? Work that may or may not go anywhere, that may be discouraging or painful? Do we love work, making a living to do work, not the other way around? Do we love practice, the way great athletes do? Or do we chase short-term attention and validation – whether that’s indulging in the endless search for ideas or simply the distraction of talk and chatter?
Make it so you don’t have to fake it – that’s the key.
According to Seneca, the Greek word euthymia is one we should think of often: it is the sense of our own path and how to stay on it without getting distracted by all the others that intersect it. In other words, it’s not about beating the other guy. It’s not about having more than the others. It’s about being what you are, and being as good as possible at it, without succumbing to all the things that draw you away from it. It’s about going where you set out to go.
O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand! To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face! To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance! To be indeed a God! Walt Whitman.
Enjoy it, recognize it, remember it. Having it for a moment is the same as having it forever.
As one addict put it, addiction is when we’ve “lost the freedom to abstain.
Move forward, move onward. Another book isn’t the answer. The right choices and decisions are.
They underestimate us. A huge advantage.