The great Roman philosopher, statesman, dramatist Seneca (BC 4 – AD 64) wrote many letters encouraging friends to apply themselves to the task of living a free, wise, tranquil and joyful life. On the Shortness of Life is one of my personal favorites since Seneca, ever the true eclectic, brilliantly draws from the various streams of ancient wisdom: Stoic, Epicurean, Platonic, Skeptic, and Cynic, as he addresses some of the most important questions we face as humans. Below are several quotes along with my comments.

“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is – the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but as wasteful of it.”

One thing I personally find highly distasteful: television sets in hospital rooms. I wonder how many men and women have spent their last hours watching Daffy Duck cartoons or a weather report. When in the hospital several years ago, I insisted on a room where the television would not be on. As an adult I’ve always recognized every single moment of life is precious, not to be wasted on silliness or surrendered to commercialized mind-control.

“Many are kept busy either in the pursuit of other men’s fortune or in complaining of their own; in following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new, some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but Fate takes them unawares while they loll and yawn.”

As a teenager I distinctly recall lolling around the house, bored out of my skull. Fortunately, once I encountered philosophy and literature in college, boredom completely dissolved, never once since those early teenage years have I ever been bored. And why do people continually complain or gab incessantly or become easily bored? According to Seneca, such a person knows nothing about the art of living.

“You will hear many men saying: ‘After my fiftieth year I shall retire to leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.’ And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer?”

How many people project their happiness into their retirement years? My modest advice: life is too short for drudgery – If you don’t like your current job, find another one; if you don’t like your current life; it’s time for serious transformation.

"There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn. . . . it takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and – what will perhaps make you wonder more – it takes the whole of life to learn how to die."

This quote from Seneca reminds me of a Japanese aphorism: "Life without death isn’t life, it’s self-preservation." Death as a taboo subject is one of the tragedies of modern culture.

"And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles, he has no lived long – he has existed long. For what if you should think that man had had a long voyage who had been caught by a fierce storm as soon as he left harbor, and, swept hither and thither by a succession of winds that raged from different quarters, had been driven in a circle around the same course? Not much voyaging did he have, but much tossing about.”

Such a vivid image. If you feel your life is an endless cycle of frantic activity, time to step back and take a deep breath with Seneca.

“Unless you seize the day, it flees.”

Carpe diem. It has been said so many times, it sounds like a cliché. But, in this case, the cliché is spot-on true.

“Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live. . . . We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with Cynics."

The world expands for us when we participate in the great wisdom of the philosophical tradition. This is one way to view the Platonic ideas. For the great philosophers of the ancient Greek and Roman world, philosophy was a path to personal transformation and liberation. And this path is still open to us today.

This is one to keep coming back to.

2.75