Keep doing what you are doing, Lucilius.1 Set yourself free — for your own sake. Gather up your time.
Some of it has been taken off you by force. Some was quietly removed while you were being agreeable about it. And some simply slid out of your hands while you were looking somewhere else. That last kind is the disgraceful kind, because nobody took it.
You put it down.
The Only Thing We Own
Look honestly at where your hours actually go. You will find that the largest portion of a life is spent doing badly, a good share doing nothing at all, and the whole of it doing what is beside the point.
Now show me the man who puts a value on his time. Who reckons up what a day is worth. Who understands that he is dying daily.
Because we make a plain error about death. We look forward to it, as though it were standing somewhere up ahead waiting for us to arrive. Most of it has already happened. Every year behind you is in death's keeping now.
Nothing is ours except time.
Nature entrusted us with the ownership of that single thing, and it is so fleeting and so slippery that anyone who cares to can turn us out of possession. And look at how we behave about it. Cheap things — replaceable things, things a man can simply buy again — he counts those carefully and knows perfectly well that he owes for them. But hand him a portion of your time, which is the one loan that even a grateful man can never repay, and he does not consider himself in debt at all.
So take hold of every hour. Get your hands on today's work and you will be less at the mercy of tomorrow's. While we are postponing, life is going past.
You may want to know how I am doing at this, since I preach it to you so freely. I will tell you frankly. My accounts balance about the way you would expect from a man who is open-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing. I can tell you exactly what I am wasting, and by what means, and why — which is more than most men can, and it is the beginning of the cure.
And do not think a man is poor if what remains is enough for him. But keep what is really yours, and start early. Our ancestors had a saying:
Important
It is too late to start saving when you reach the bottom of the barrel. What is down there is not much, and it is the worst of it.
How Fast It Actually Goes
I went to Campania recently and I saw your Pompeii, and it made me miss you absurdly. I could see you standing there. I could see you swallowing your tears at the moment we parted, and losing that fight.
It was a moment ago. And what is not a moment ago, once you start using your memory?
- It was a moment ago that I sat as a boy in Sotion's school.
- A moment ago that I first pleaded a case in the courts.
- A moment ago that I lost the appetite for pleading
- A moment ago that I lost the ability.
Time moves infinitely fast, and the people who see this most clearly are the ones looking backwards. While we are inside the present, we do not notice it at all; the passage is that gentle. Do you want to know why? Because all past time is filed in the same place. It lies together and presents the same face.
Everything slides into the same pit.
And nature has played a joke on us here. The time we spend living is a point — less than a point — and she has taken that infinitesimal thing and made it appear long by dividing it up. She cut off one piece and called it infancy, another childhood, another youth, another the slope down from youth, and then old age on its own.
So many stairs for such a short climb.
Lately it seems faster than I can believe. Either because I can feel the finishing line coming closer, or because I have finally started paying attention and adding up my losses.
Everywhere Means Nowhere
Which brings me to your reading, because you read constantly and you read widely, and I want to warn you about it.
The first sign of a well-ordered mind is that a man can stay in one place and be content in his own company. Restlessness is the symptom of a disordered one — and it appears in a man's reading before it appears anywhere else in his life.
So linger among a few master minds and digest them.
Everywhere means nowhere. A man who spends his life traveling ends up with a great many acquaintances and no friends, and the man who visits every author in a hurry and settles with none ends up exactly the same.
Food does you no good if it leaves the stomach as soon as it arrives. Nothing obstructs a cure like changing the medicine. No wound heals if you try a different dressing every day. A plant that is constantly moved never takes root. Nothing is so powerful that it can help you while it is being shifted about.
You will say you want to dip into one book and then another. That is the appetite of a man with too many dishes in front of him — plenty of variety, no nourishment.
So: you cannot read all the books you own; therefore, own only as many as you can read. And each day, out of everything you have run past, pick one thought and chew it until it is yours. One a day, kept. That is my own practice, and it is the only reason any of my reading has done me good.
I Have No Time for This
I am angry about how much of this brief thing men give away to what does not matter — time which, however carefully you guard it, will not stretch to cover even the necessary business.
Cicero said that if you doubled the number of his days he still would not find time to read the lyric poets. Put the logic-choppers in the same category, and they are worse, because the lyric poets at least admit they are frivolous. The dialecticians believe they are engaged on something serious.
Why torture yourself and lose weight over a puzzle it would be cleverer to have despised than to have solved? When a soldier is marching at his leisure, he can pick up curiosities along the road. When the enemy closes on the rear, and the order comes to quicken the pace, he throws away everything he gathered in peacetime.
Well, I am under siege right now. Not from outside a wall, either — the deadly things are already in the room with me.
Death is on my trail and life is running out of me. So teach me something I can use against that. Bring it about that I stop trying to escape from death, and that life stops escaping from me. Give me courage for hardship. Make me calm in the face of what I cannot avoid. Stretch the narrow limits of the time I have been given. Show me that the good in a life does not depend on its length but on the use made of it — and that it is common, not rare, for a man who has lived long to have lived very little.
Say to me when I lie down: you may not wake. And when I wake: you may not sleep again. Say to me when I leave the house: you may not come back. And when I come back: you may never go out again.
You think it is only at sea that there is a thin plank between a man and death. The distance is exactly that narrow everywhere. Death does not always show himself so close at hand. He is always that close.
Balance the Account Nightly
Cornelius Senecio — you knew him — dined comfortably one evening, having spent the whole day at the bedside of a friend who was dying. He was taken with a throat infection, and by daybreak he was gone. A few hours between performing every duty of a healthy man and being nothing at all.
How absurd it is to lay out a life when you do not own tomorrow. I will buy, I will build, I will lend and call in, I will take office, and then, old and satisfied, I will rest. Everything is doubtful, including everything going well. No man has any right to draw on the future.
Important
The great flaw in a life is that it is always unfinished, with some portion of it always postponed. The man who puts the finishing touch to his life daily is never short of time. It is out of that shortage that fear comes, and the craving for more future, which eats the mind.
So how do you stop the wobbling? Only one way. Stop reaching forward. A man is anxious about the future exactly to the degree that his present is no use to him.
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life. Do that, and a day and eternity come out at the same value, and you can watch the whole succession of ages go past and laugh.
The language of truth is simple. Let us not make it complicated.