October 23rd, 2023

These passages are taken directly from the article "The Wisdom of Meditating on Mortality".  Here are a few excerpts that I think are valuable.  To read the full article, please click on button below.


We die every day, for every day some part of life is taken from us. Even when we are still growing, our life is shrinking. We lost our infancy, then childhood, then youth. All our time was lost in the moment of passage, right up to yesterday, and even today is divided with death as it goes by. As the water clock does not empty out its last drop only but also whatever dripped through it before, our last hour of existence is not the only time we die but just the only time we finish dying. That is when we arrive at death, but we have been a long time coming there.

The practice of remembering your death or memento mori is an aspect of what the Stoics called the premeditation of adversity. You contemplate negative things that could happen to you in advance, just for a moment. Doing so removes the sting of them should they actually happen. And one of the benefits of doing this is realizing how many things in life we actually take for granted.

Time (and Death)
In the letter titled today as Taking charge of your time, Seneca asked, “Can you show me even one person who sets a price on his time, who knows the worth of a day, who realizes that every day is a day when he is dying?
We are wrong to think that death lies ahead: much of it has passed us by already, for all our past life is in the grip of death. — Seneca

The Wisdom of Meditating on Mortality