Is my attention actually on the things at hand?
Even now I think. “Eh, I’ll go to the range next weekend.” I’ll do this and I’ll do that next weekend. Someday needs to become today.
I need to follow through on my plans. Life is a gift and I need to treat it like a gift instead of something I’ll “deal with” eventually.
Momento Mori.
Stoic philosophy will tell us that tranquility can be found by trusting that we are generally on the right path rather than listening to the rabble and changing direction based on external factors.
Work has been tough lately. The company I work for is going through some changes and not insignificant ones either. There are a lot of people who don’t like the direction it’s heading and these are long term employees.
It has really concerned me near the end of 2023 and the start of 2024 as a couple of people that I’ve gotten to know have left, sharing their reasons with me. And they aren’t alone in these reasons, there are quite a few others whose justifications sound very similar.
It’s made me nervous, leaving me to question if I should be shopping the market and moving on as well… rather than being someone standing on the deck of the Titanic as it breaks in half before plummeting through the depths to the bottom of the ocean.
I think the wise advice that was given to me was that I have to judge for myself if I am at a place inside me where I need to move on. This rang true at the time and I feel is in alignment with the stoic philosophy that I try to live by. I am not at the same place inside as these other people are, at least not yet.
Will the market become more difficult should I opt to move later? Certainly. However chasing after what other people are doing has left me feeling a lot of anxiety about the present and the future.
I can’t let this derail me.
Time can be fleeting… slipping through our fingers like sand.
It seemingly moves slowly at first, while we are but in our youth. We imagine ourselves immortal, that our lives will carry on without end. Death is a problem for our future selves. Some of us, foolishly, wish for an early end to our lives to end our pain without appreciating the finality and emptiness of death.
The more that time passes, the faster it seems to escape through our fingers. While it was always passing with the same speed, it is relative to our age and hurtles us closer towards our own mortality as it does from our creation.
It’s the facing of this mortality, REAL mortality, that we begin to understand the value of our time. When we understand the value of our time, it’s then that we can start to pay attention to how we spend it. There are a billion ways that we can spend our lives with what we devote our energy to being fought over by people and companies, trying to steal our energy and distract us from the things that we really need to focus on. Detract from us setting and achieving our goals.
Living is a choice. We make choices every minute of every day that can lead us to our goals and satisfaction in our lives, or they can pull us away from them… leaving us for wanting. The road is hard and only hard things are worth fighting for.
To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the seas falls still around it.
Concentrate every minute like a Roman-like a man-on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can-if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus