“Life is long, if you know how to use it.” — Seneca
An impossibly hard question for someone whose mind is rattling with quotes all day. To answer it, I asked myself:
“If specific one-liners help the most in specific situations, what’s the one-liner that would motivate me the most in a big variety of different ones?”
I knew it must be a line that alludes both to the gratitude we ought to practice for ever being born, as well as remind us of the frailty of this gift. Steve Jobs said death is very likely the single best invention of life, as it creates the ultimate urgency to do what’s right, if viewed from the right perspective.
No one manages to describe this perspective better than Seneca in On the Shortness of Life.
Life is long…
There, the gratitude, the wonder, the miracle. We’re given a long time on this earth, a grant supply of time to enjoy, inspire and do our work.
…if you know how to use it.
Yet, we must use it well. It is finite. To squander it would be a waste. The condition of the gift we’re given is that it is up to make it so, for else it will have been nothing but a stream of sand, running off a piece of rock, impervious to its consequences.
To remember the quote when you need it the most, it helps to embed it into its context once. Here are some of my favorite passages from the book, which I’ve re-arranged so they build on top of each other, finally delivering the message (emphasis mine).
People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.
For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last.
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire…
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.
So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…
Life is long if you know how to use it.
This is a very short, but insanely powerful book. There are free translations online, but this one in particular is from the Great Ideas series by Penguin books.
You can find more of my thoughts on it here.
