Seneca, Moral Letters 23.6

Now is the time for me to pay my debt. I can give you a saying of your friend Epicurus and thus clear this letter of its obligation: 

 

"It is bothersome always to be beginning life." 

 

Or another, which will perhaps express the meaning better: 

 

"They live ill who are always beginning to live."

 

You are right in asking why; the saying certainly stands in need of a commentary. 

 

It is because the life of such persons is always incomplete. But a man cannot stand prepared for the approach of death if he has just begun to live. We must make it our aim already to have lived long enough. No one deems that he has done so, if he is just on the point of planning his life.

 

You need not think that there are few of this kind; practically everyone is of such a stamp. Some men, indeed, only begin to live when it is time for them to leave off living. And if this seems surprising to you, I shall add that which will surprise you still more: Some men have left off living before they have begun. Farewell. 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 23

 

I must always be on the watch for brooding resentments, and one I have faced for many years is my frustration with the waste in education, or perhaps more properly the bloat in education. 

 

We convince ourselves that we are now so much more advanced and refined, and so we extend the schooling necessary for a “respectable” life more and more. We ship children off to what are little more than cold and clinical prisons at an ever-younger age, and we continue various forms of professional indoctrination long into adulthood. 

 

All of this, we insist, is to prepare them for life, and yet so much of that time is filled with nothing more than busywork and play acting. It has sadly become a business, where the young, and increasingly the old, are captive customers. We are constantly preparing to live, and then putting off the actual living. 

 

I cope with the instinct of blame and anger by working on myself, making certain that I somehow assist a student in thriving as a human being right here and now, not waiting for some vain promise of riches and fame in coming decades. 

 

In all of life, we delay when we are uncertain of who we are, or afraid of what we suspect we must do. The courage to act will only come with conviction, and conviction will only arise from a thorough understanding of the true and the good. 

 

It may require countless years of jumping through the hoops to be seen as a formal scholar, but it takes only a sincerely open mind to become a genuine philosopher of life. The joy that comes from acting with meaning and purpose, at any age and under any circumstances, does not need to wait. 

 

It will be made evident in daily practice, not in a lecture hall. It can be done at this very moment, not after a tedious process of climbing to the top of any heap. 

 

Indeed, for far too many of us, life is all windup and no pitch. We may then be consumed by panic, realizing we have dawdled, and desperately hoping we can make up for the lost time. Most tragic of all is never even having taken the first steps, leaving this world no better and no wiser than we entered it. 

—Reflection written in 9/2012