No great inventor will add 25 hours a day. This means that we have to choose every day: devote a specific hour to reading or shopping, chatting with friends or chatting with our own child, jogging in the park or the next episode of a TV movie … Do we make a choice consciously? And in favor of what – what is important or just convenient? The Roman Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca reflects on the value of passing time.
From Moral Letters to Lucilius
“…Some of our time is taken by force, some is kidnapped, some is wasted. But the most shameful loss of all is our own negligence. Take a closer look: after all, we spend the largest part of our lives on bad deeds, a considerable part on idleness, and all our lives on the wrong things.
Will you show me someone who would value time, who would know what a day is worth, who would understand that he is dying every hour? That is our misfortune, that we see death ahead; and most of it is behind us, – after all, how many years of life have passed, all belong to death … Do the same, my Lucilius, as you write to me: do not miss an hour. If you hold today in your hands, you will be less dependent on tomorrow. It’s not that as long as you put it off, your whole life will rush by.
Everything with us, Lucilius, is alien, only our time. Only time, elusive and fluid, was given to us by nature, but whoever wants it takes it away. Mortals, on the other hand, are stupid: having received something insignificant, cheap and surely easily reimbursable, they allow themselves to be charged; but those who have been given time do not consider themselves debtors, although even those who know gratitude will not return the only time.
* Seneca “Moral letters to Lucilius”, letter I (ABC, 2013).
Seneca Lucius Annei (he is simply called Seneca the Younger, in contrast to his father, the famous philosopher Seneca the Elder) is a Roman philosopher, poet, statesman, one of the most famous representatives of Stoicism.