October 6
Even if you were to live three thousand years, or ten times as long: remember that no one loses any life other than the one he is living now, and lives no other than the one he is losing.
Meditations II,14
Listening mode
Even if you were to live three thousand years, or ten times as long: remember that no one loses any life other than the one he is living now, and lives no other than the one he is losing.
When you imagine losing years, you usually think of a quantity: ten years fewer, a summer that will never come. A number can be compared, and that is exactly why it frightens you.
But you have never lived a quantity. You only ever have an afternoon, a conversation, an hour with the post half dealt with. Whatever can be taken from you has this form every time, no matter how much more might come after it. A longer life would bring you more hours like these, but none that you would have in any other way.
At first this sounds like a call to savour every one of them. Most hours, though, can't be savoured. They are distracted, tired or filled with waiting. Even so, they make up most of what you have. If you counted only the special ones, your life would be much shorter than it is.
Perhaps what shifts, rather, is the question of what a lost day is. Not necessarily one in which nothing happened. More one that you were measuring the whole time against another, one that was still to come.
In the evening the post is still lying on the table.
