⌛On the Shortness of Life

Life is not short. We are given plenty and we spend most of it on other people's business, on ambition, on worry and on putting things off, and then complain at the end that there was not enough. People guard their money and their land fiercely and hand out their time to anyone who asks, because time has no visible price. The only people truly at leisure are those who make time for thinking, because they add every past age to their own.

• Read on Saturday 12 July, the fifth day of the heat, after twenty minutes on the slabs and a cold shower. Thirty-four degrees in the flat. Shutters closed, fan on, Pallet flat on the tiles in the hall.
• The essay is about nineteen centuries old. I read it in a modern translation, a slim paperback, so nothing here is quoted. All of it is my paraphrase. The Sunday letters I read in an old public-domain version, and those I do quote, in 📕 Moral Letters to Lucilius.
• Written to a man called Paulinus, who by most accounts ran the grain supply of Rome. A philosopher telling the city's head of logistics to retire. I laughed, alone, in the heat.
• It was a low fortnight and I half expected to be told off. He is sharper than that. His target is not the idle. It is the busy.
• Finished on Sunday morning and wrote the note, and then the processing log that says flat, not sad.
• Read beside 📕 Four Thousand Weeks, started three days earlier, and beside the questions in 🪷 Evening review in the Stoic manner.
• The two quote notes linked here are from the Letters and not from this essay: 💬 While we are postponing, life speeds and 💬 Lay hold of to-day's task. Same author, same argument, and a translation old enough to quote.
• In the year's vocabulary it is 🧩 Stocks and flows: a stock with no inflow, and a great many people helping themselves to the outflow.