[Greetings, friends, from Austin, and Happy New Year! With the turn of the new year often comes new, best-laid plans for a more prosperous life in the 365 days to come. We set goals and targets aimed at somewhere we perceive to be better and then reverse engineer the steps it will take to get there. Sometimes, we achieve those things we set out to do. Other times, we miss the mark. Then the next year comes, and we move the goalpost, giving ourselves something else to shoot for.
In many cases, we set goals and targets as a means to some other end—that is, we make a list of things we want to do, be, or achieve in pursuit of what we believe those things will bring: happiness, peace, comfort, etc. We work to become wealthy so we can buy to become happy. Except what we buy never brings any sense of lasting joy so we must go on repeating the cycle until we die, never having found the thing we were really after—rarely doing things that are ends in themselves.
But what if we could short-circuit the process and start doing more of what we plan to do when we retire, today? What would it look like to make sure more of our day is spent doing things that are ends in themselves—things we enjoy for their own sake, separate from anyone else’s opinion or approval? What would it look like and make our one days our todays?
One way of identifying those things is to ask: if I were on my deathbed, what do I wish I would have done more of? Or: if I had to repeat today for eternity, what would I want to be a part of it?
Part of the utility of these questions is that they get us to sit with a truth we all must face: time is our most valuable asset, yet it’s one we most regularly waste on superfluous things, when we should be spending it on the most precious things—building beautiful things, loving God and loving people, making art of life, and life our greatest art.
That’s why, when stepping into a new year with all its goals and plans, I find it helpful to first step back and think about time like a budget. It helps me allocate my most precious resource to what’s also precious. It ensures, insofar as something can ensure, that my days are structured to elevate me both today (in case I die tomorrow) and ten years from now (in case I live that long).
To get us, together, into a headspace where we can view our lives from this lens, I offer today’s essay: a short meditation on the shortness of life. How it empties like an hourglass whose remaining balance is unknown. And what we are to do about it.]
Each of us gets the same 86,400 seconds deposited in our account each day. How we spend those seconds becomes how we spend our days. And how we spend our days becomes how we spend our lives. Moments well spent make a life well lived.
When we get wrapped up in the world of wanting to do, have, and be more, we walk ourselves into the barrenness of a busy life. It is a life spent showing up for others and our obligations and being absent for ourselves. It is the type of life Kierkegaard warns against in Either / Or: “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy—to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.”1
In a world where “busy” is often a response given by those who see it as a badge of honor, one of the greatest tricks of the ego is convincing us that if our days are full our lives will be. But the mere act of filling our time is not the same as spending it wisely. Busy is not a badge if one busys oneself with the wrong things.
The problem is hardly new. Two thousand years ago, in his essay On the Shortness of Life, the Roman Stoic Seneca delivered doses of hard truth as relevant today as they were in his day. Perhaps even more so.
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.2
When it comes to time, Seneca writes, we are “most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”3 In his very first letter to his friend Lucilius, Seneca hammers home the same point about how we ought to use our time:
Continue to act thus, my dear Lucilius—set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands. Make yourself believe the truth of my words—that certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.
What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.
Therefore, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.4
In a later letter, Seneca adds to his point: not only does life speed by, but death is also always approaching. Every breath in is a little life, and each breath out is a little death—taking a small portion of our allotment with it. Each moment that passes, another grain of sand slips into the graveyard of our hourglass. Our remaining balance is constantly diminishing into the hands of a reaper we can never reclaim it from. Like the sand, we slip from dust pile to dust pile with borrowed breath between.
For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, then our boyhood, and then our youth. Counting even yesterday, all past time is lost time; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.5
On their face, these reflections on how fast life slips away may seem like harsh and unpleasant reminders meant to make us sad. But that is not their purpose; their purpose is to bring joy. In thinking about how fast time flies, we gain a renewed sense of urgency to live a life aligned with our priorities and remember to give ourselves to what really matters instead of allowing frivolous things to frit our lives away.
Whatever our New Year’s resolutions are, I hope we have the honesty to answer these questions first: Are we spending our time to purchase a full life, or are we finding ways to keep our lives busy and barren? Are we feeding the things that light us (and therefore, the world) up? Or are we sacrificing my most precious resource at the altar of something ultimately meaningless and empty? Are we living a life we’re willing to sign when our painting gets hung in the hall of eternity? Are we making the most of the gift? Remember:
Hours have wings, fly up to the author of time, and carry news of our usage. All our prayers cannot entreat one of them either to return or slacken his pace. The misspents of every minute we thought thus, we should dismiss them with empty, or laden with dangerous intelligence. How happy is it when they carry up not only the messages, but the fruits of good, and stay with the Ancient of Days to speak for us before His glorious throne.6
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P.S.
How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.7
Soren Kierkegaard, Either / Or.
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life (hereinafter, “Shortness of Life”).
Shortness of Life.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 1: On Saving Time.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 24: On Despising Death.
Sir John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life, p. 77 (supposedly quoting Milton, but the words don’t appear to have ever been written by Milton).
The Pleasures of Life, p. 75.