Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Reread
I had read it once or twice before. This time it stopped me — the same words, a different version of me.
"Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. … a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return."
For days I had been circling the question of what it actually takes to strengthen character. Then, over black coffee on an almost-empty stomach, a man writing privately to himself said the plainest possible thing: the time given to him will either clear the clouds from his mind, or it will go — and take him with it. For one strange morning it felt like a sign. Start doing it. Maybe it was the coffee. Maybe I was simply ready to hear it.
What stayed was the arithmetic. Whole hours go to conversations with people who aren't in the room — who was nice, who wasn't, what someone meant — while the body ages and the days actually run out. None of it was new; at university I loved exactly these questions. The book only brought them back to the surface, and left me with the smallest version of the question: what am I doing with the one thing that is actually running out?