Life is long, if you know how to use it

"Life is long, if you know how to use it."  Seneca, 4 BCE - 65 CE

Every morning I come across a number of ideas and quotes from the various texts I read before I start the day. Today these words, were spoken by Seneca, sometime around when we turned from BC to CE.

I have always lived by believing life is short. And within that idea, I have struggled with the conflicting tensions that because life is short there are two wildly differing interpretations of needing to make the absolute most of it, and every moment you have. The conflict - the tension - exists between two notions of making the most of time.

The first: if life is short, you better use every single moment to work hard, work on important things for society and yourself, never be afraid to take risks, do difficult things, aspire to be a pioneer and play your small part in pushing humanity forward. In essence, to never waste an opportunity or time try to achieve something great with your life because it could be all over in a flash and you want it to have stood for something. 

The second: that if life is short, then it could be all over in a flash - we need to constantly live with greater awareness, and presence and appreciation for all the small and beautiful things that make up an ordinary day. Slow everything down, and live every moment we can have with our family, our friends, our surroundings and our planet. Spend as much time doing the things that give the greatest pleasure and the greatest ease. Appreciate the sky, the earth, the trees, the air. Be conscious and thankful that we are alive, healthy, and have time to spend with people we care about.

Now Seneca casts a new lengthy light on this constant tension of the opposites by exposing us as frauds believing that life is short and we need to rush to pack it all in before we pack it up.

The wisdom in his thought is that if you live consciously every day, constantly, in pursuit of the blend of what you aspire for - both presence, and prominence; there is a way to slow time down. Time can be slowed down, we all know this, because we feel it in various capacities. So if time can be slowed down, perhaps we can get better at appreciating how to slow it down while still getting everything we feel we need to do, done? 

I don’t know enough about who Seneca was, but to be remembered a few thousand years after having said something suggests I should. I’ll dwell on him and how we might better slow things down for a few days, and perhaps that will be the subject of some future post. A fuller version of the quote below:

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.