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You pull it out of the fridge to throw away—some food that expired two weeks ago. It’s time to renew your car registration. You have to rip out a few pages of the calendar (maybe the Daily Stoic desk calendar?!) because you were away from the office for a few days.

What are you looking at here? That expiration date, that pile of pages from the calendar—this is time. Time elapsed you’ll never get back. But more than elapsed, right? You spent that time. On something. What happened in the two weeks since the milk went bad? What do you have to show for the year these registration tags have been on your car?

Seneca said that we should never spend an hour of our time without knowing what the return was. He was saying we can’t waste time, we can’t just let life happen. We can’t let the pages fall from the calendar, the days tick by. Because we’ll never get them back. They belong to death now.

This isn’t to say you have to spend every minute working. Or focus exclusively on “productivity.” On the contrary, you have to live. You have to know what you’re spending that life on. You have to be aware. Or you will be caught unaware....Daily Stoic

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ThunderMoon
23:32 Dec 17 2021

So True

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No one, not even a Stoic is unbreakable.

We have a long history of the Stoics being devastated by things. Cato at the loss of his brother. Marcus and the victims of the plague. Seneca undone by his exile. Stockdale’s body ravaged by 7 years in the Hanoi Hilton.

They did not simply shrug these things off. How could they? They were human beings. While Stoicism promises to help you build an “inner citadel,” a fortress of power and resilience that prepares you for the difficulties of the world, it makes no promises to make you superhuman. A Stoic isn't someone invincible.. A Stoic is someone who puts themself back together so they can do what needs to be done, for themselves and for others.

The Stoics would have liked the Japanese art form known as Kintsugi, which dates back to the 15th century. In it, masters repair broken plates and cups and bowls, but instead of simply fixing them back to their original state, they make them better. The broken pieces are not glued together, but instead fused with a special lacquer mixed with gold or silver. The legend is that the art form was created after a broken tea bowl was sent to China for repairs. But the returned bowl was ugly — the same bowl as before, but cracked. Kintsugi was invented as a way to turn the scars of a break into something beautiful.

Courage isn’t about being invulnerable. It’s about getting back up, it’s about healing. A Stoic finds a way to become stronger at the broken pieces, as Epictetus did, literally, after having his leg snapped by his torturous master. It’s Audie Murphy—the most decorated soldier in American history—returning home, damaged by war and like many veterans and trauma survivors, with PTSD. But he decides that this will not define him. “Suddenly, life faces us,” he concludes his memoir. “I swear to myself that I will measure up to it. I may be branded by war, but I will not be defeated by it.”

You will lose people you love. You might be financially ruined by someone you trusted. You might put yourself out there, put every bit of your effort into something, and fail. You might be passed over for the thing you wanted so badly. The question is, as always, what will you do with this? How will you respond? Will you let it defeat you? Or will you put the pieces back together and be made stronger for what happened? ...The Daily Stoic

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NikkiAidyn
11:50 Dec 14 2021

They were not invincible but their teachings gave them more resilience than most...I have found that integrating some of stoicism into other teachings I've learned has helped me a lot in life.

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Life may be beautiful, but its origins and its ending rarely are. We are born amidst pain and yelling (and occasionally urine and feces). We die when our body quits on us. It doesn’t matter how great your life is, how much money you make, or how much power you amass; in the end, we go out with a whimper. As the 16th century Stoic-friendly philosopher Blaise Pascal observed: “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever."

What should one take from this? That it’s all meaningless? That death should be feared? Avoided at all costs?

Hardly.

What the Stoics want us to derive from these meditations on our mortality is a sense for the humbling fragility of our existence and, as a consequence, a renewed focus on the now. The final act is bloody, so let us make the play as good as possible. We are rotting meat in a bag, Marcus Aurelius once said, the expiration date is approaching. What is there to be anxious about with death? The matter is settled. It won’t be pretty. And you don’t have a say.

We are simply returning to the beginning of the cycle—one that if you recall correctly, you have no recollection of. Nobody remembers their birth, despite being present for it. The same will be true of our deaths, no matter how painful or sad or unexpected they are.

So get to living. Today. While you still have the time.

***the daily stoic.