More than sixty entries of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations touch on death and the transient nature of all things. The topic of death gives Meditations a reoccurring theme of urgency: there is no time to waste. Marcus ultimately learned from Stoicism that death was an “indifferent” and nothing to fear.
Take a few moments to contemplate this passage from Book 3:
“One must take into consideration not only the fact that life is being used up day by day and there’s less of it left, but also that, if one were to live longer, there’s no guarantee that one’s mind will remain unaffected and capable of understanding the way things are in themselves, or the concepts that guide one’s experience of matters both divine and human. […]
You must have a sense of urgency, not only because at each moment, you’re drawing closer to death, but also because your understanding of the world around you and your ability to pay attention to it will come to an end before you do.”
“Everything that we do, say, and think,” Marcus wrote to himself, “should be predicated on the possibility of our imminent departure from life.”
Similarly, Seneca stressed in a letter to Lucilius, “We die every day, for every day some part of life is taken from us. Even when we are still growing, our life is shrinking.”… All our time was lost in the moment of passage, right up to yesterday, and even today is divided with death as it goes by.
For Seneca, dying was one of the essential functions of living and the only one that could not be learned or refined through repetition. But the question is — what should we do about it?
The sixteenth-century philosopher Montaigne suggested, “I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”
Meditating on our mortality helps us remember to lead the type of life we actually want to live. This ancient practice that exists across wisdom traditions has the ability to put into perspective what truly matters.
In the short book, How to Die, author James Romm (a previous podcast guest) writes that modern readers have sometimes found Seneca’s writing to be death-obsessed. But Seneca might respond that such readers are life obsessed, deluding themselves with a denial of the importance of death.
“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” — Seneca.
The uncertainty of life (or the fundamental truth) is not a burden — it’s a blessing. The paradox of uncertainty is that by living with (or remembering) the certainty of death, we can begin to actually live in the uncertainty of life.
To quote Marcus Aurelius a final time, “Don’t act as though you were going to live for ten thousand years. Fate is hanging over your head. While you live—while you can—be a good person.”
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
JW