December 18
Everything, Lucilius, belongs to others; time alone is ours. Nature has given us this one fleeting, uncertain possession — and anyone who wishes can crowd us out of it.
Letters to Lucilius, Letter 1
Listening mode
Everything, Lucilius, belongs to others; time alone is ours. Nature has given us this one fleeting, uncertain possession — and anyone who wishes can crowd us out of it.
Time is not like other possessions. You cannot store it, cannot set it aside for later, cannot lend it out and ask for it back. It passes even when you keep it entirely to yourself. What belongs to you, then, is less the hour itself than the question of what it is spent on.
That is exactly the question that is easy to skip over. A request that is only supposed to take a moment, an obligation that follows from the last one: nobody is taking anything from you; you agree yourself every time. Only in the evening do you notice that the day was full, yet hardly anything in it came from you.
Conversely, some hours that seemed to have been taken from you later turned out to be the ones you remember most clearly. A detour for someone else, a conversation that wrecked your plan. Time crowded out and time given away are hard to tell apart in the moment. Often it only becomes clear afterwards which was which.
By then the hour is long gone. You cannot demand it back, and perhaps you would have given it away anyway.
