Killing Time

Killing time here means time is killing you. No, it’s not that we are ill-equipped with a short life, but rather it’s our wastefulness of time that makes it so. Seneca teaches us that life is long if you know how to use it (click: On The Shortness Of Life).

(His) memo from life’s final quarter: “How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived.” Stupid? Easy for him to say, yet we “mortals” may have been preoccupied in those earlier years with our figurative survival while we thrash ourselves upstream to spawn.

Point well taken, however, when he observes everyone hustling their lives along, troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. We’ve discussed before the extent to which our then-present earlier lives may have been hijacked by some other priority or distraction, captured by cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s (Doonesbury) lament about trying to develop a lifestyle that didn’t require his presence. One sighs reflecting on one’s twenties-self and what might have been missed in return for that career, that future.

And so it begins. We fail to treat time as a valuable resource, even though it is arguably our most precious and least renewable one. Seneca saw busyness – that dual demon of distraction and preoccupation – as an addiction that stands in the way of mastering the art of living, for no activity can be successfully pursued by the preoccupied individual. New preoccupation takes the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. We thereby become fugitives to ourselves.

Okay, perhaps unsurprisingly given his own occupation, Seneca points to the study of philosophy as the only worthwhile occupation of the mind and spirit. Only those who invoke the invaluable teachings of select others are able to inhabit and expand their own lives in order to fully take part in this “brief and transient spell” of existence. Short lives are thereby expanded sideways as participants focus their attention on living wide over long.

While we may not be empowered to choose the parents who were allotted to us we can choose whose children we would like to be. There is a smorgasbord of households of the noblest intellects into which we can choose to be adopted.

In a shameless display of self-promotion, perhaps see Member Monday in the same way that author Ann Morrow embraced the act of writing – more important than living for it is being conscious of living.

Maybe time for a gentleman’s agreement: dedicate attention to Seneca’s priorities even as we keep our day jobs.