Daaamn. Reading Meditations, this jumped out at me:
Thou must hasten therefore; not only because thou art every day nearer unto death than other, but also because that intellective faculty in thee, whereby thou art enabled to know the true nature of things, and to order all thy actions by that knowledge, doth daily waste and decay: or, may fail thee before thou die.
To paraphrase:
Sure, hurry up and do stuff before you die, but that’s not enough. You’ll run out of strength and get dementia way before that. So hurry up even more!
Hoo boy. This is not the chill, everything’s fine, don’t stress, Zen style Stoicism I was promised. 😆
@snarfed.org I feel like one of the core lessons of (classic?) stoicism is to be able to sit with some of those frightening realities, because they are reality and we can’t hide from that, but also to focus our efforts on what we can do rather than on harmful dwelling.
I often talk to my coaching clients about showing up as a leader in a way that acknowledges the shitty things about our situation while also being hopeful about the future. It’s a hard tightrope to walk sometimes.
Marcus Aurelius calling it like it is: “use it before you lose it”.