Seneca, Moral Letters 24.7

What, have you only at this moment learned that death is hanging over your head, at this moment exile, at this moment grief? You were born to these perils. Let us think of everything that can happen as something which will happen.

 

I know that you have really done what I advise you to do; I now warn you not to drown your soul in these petty anxieties of yours; if you do, the soul will be dulled and will have too little vigor left when the time comes for it to arise. 

 

Remove the mind from this case of yours to the case of men in general. Say to yourself that our petty bodies are mortal and frail; pain can reach them from other sources than from wrong or the might of the stronger. Our pleasures themselves become torments; banquets bring indigestion, carousals paralysis of the muscles and palsy, sensual habits affect the feet, the hands, and every joint of the body.

 

I may become a poor man; I shall then be one among many. 

 

I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself as born in the place to which I shall be sent. 

 

They may put me in chains. What then? Am I free from bonds now? 

 

Behold this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me! 

 

"I shall die," you say; you mean to say "I shall cease to run the risk of sickness; I shall cease to run the risk of imprisonment; I shall cease to run the risk of death."

 

I am not so foolish as to go through at this juncture the arguments which Epicurus harps upon, and say that the terrors of the world below are idle—that Ixion does not whirl round on his wheel, that Sisyphus does not shoulder his stone uphill, that a man's entrails cannot be restored and devoured every day; no one is so childish as to fear Cerberus, or the shadows, or the spectral garb of those who are held together by nothing but their unfleshed bones. 

 

Death either annihilates us or strips us bare. If we are then released, there remains the better part, after the burden has been withdrawn; if we are annihilated, nothing remains; good and bad are alike removed. 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 24 

 

Once again, there is a marked difference between dreading suffering and being prepared for suffering, between being consumed by worry and getting my house in order. 

 

The grasshopper may dismiss the ant as a pessimist, though the ant knows something about the ways of the world. If it can come to pass, I should expect that it will come to pass. Fortune is fickle, and no one escapes from her schemes; it would be the greatest arrogance to think I could possibly tame her. 

 

It is at first easy to feel confident and carefree about the state of my health, my property, or my standing, and then, in the confusion of loss, it is too late to apply a remedy. The trick is not to harden myself by accumulating more, which can be whisked away just as easily, but by wanting less, which is within the realm of my control. 

 

In so many cases, the injuries don’t even come from what others do to me, and instead they arise from what I have unwittingly done to myself. Even when the robber takes my money, the deeper harm was in my attachment to the money. Was it the man who served me too much wine who made me ill, or was it my own intemperance that made me ill? 

 

With a broader perspective on life, poverty, imprisonment, or disease are no longer the deal-breakers I once believed them to be. With a deeper sense of meaning, death itself is no longer an insurmountable obstacle. Indeed, I can just as easily view dying as a release from pain as I can a consider it a source of trouble. 

 

Following the pattern of Socrates, in line with any good Stoic, Seneca reminds us how death will either remove all these failings of the flesh, and so then there will be nothing to worry about, or it will destroy us completely, and so then there will also be no one to do any worrying. 

 

Two medieval images always help me to not get carried away with idle speculation and agonizing fears about both this life and the next: 

 

First, the Wheel of Fortune tells me how the variability of circumstances favors no one, and only my attitude can provide any stability. 

 

Second, the Dance of Death tells me how we are all equal in the end, and no amount of indulgence, hoarding, or posturing can ever change that. 

—Reflection written in 10/2012