"LIFE IS LONG IF YOU KNOW HOW TO USE IT," SENECA

On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (4BC-65AD), the Roman Stoic, is a brief work that is so full of ideas that are current.  How can it be that someone from the 1st century can tap into our needs today?  It speaks to the universality of everything human I think.  It's like when I happen to check audience stats and see that someone in Andorra has looked at this blog, or someone in Czechia, the Netherlands, Portugal, or the UK. We must all have universal interests and thoughts.  We're not so different from one another, maybe not at all different from one another.  That may be true across time as well, across centuries, not just across the globe.  

Some things we are all drawn to.  The sea is one. -- Not today exactly, as we in North Carolina watch Hurricane Florence make land fall and flood our rivers, as our causeways are closed and we have evacuated with our re-entry passes in hand.  As we wait to either lose power or for its return and the branches crack and the trees thud.  No not today.  But most days.  Most days we all enjoy the tides, the mystery of the forests, the views from our mountains, the healthy endurance that nature requires.  We know that going out is the same as going in.  

So as we have the day off and I have a momentary return of power, I am reading Seneca.  How apt to read a Stoic philosopher during the silences and surges of a storm.  Let's begin with the quote,  

"Life is Long if You Know How to Use It."  

Seneca is a chider in this essay, a bit of a scold.  But what he says makes sense to me.  Think about these two statements:

"They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn." 

 "But putting things off is the biggest waste of life:  it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future.  The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today."

Or this one, 

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy." 

I am guilty of all these things, I know that.  Losing a day or night to agitation when my worries have gotten the better of me.  Putting off something I want to do.  Allowing screen time to suck away the hours. Neglecting the joy of being outdoors.    

Or this  worst--letting memories of a bad day color what could be a good day. Or a past hurt destroy the present. I like the way Seneca addresses this.  Focusing on the bad he says is like punishing ourselves for our misfortune, increasing our ills instead of lessening them.  Isn't the original loss or hurt punishment enough, he asks.  Lingering in our suffering, coddling it with attention, is like pleading for more lashes.  If that profited us, he writes, if a night spent in sorrow instead of sleep brought relief, that would be one thing.  But it doesn't.  

I'm not suggesting we all read Seneca's Consolations. Or become Stoics. But I do like it that a literary form that dates from the 5th century BC can reach us today. That the need for consolations from life's ills was the same then as now. That part of Seneca's philosophy was that contentment could be reached through simple living, reason and social equality.  Especially the contentment through simple living part.  

So I've signed up for a 14-week MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction)  course at the Center for Integrative Medicine at Duke University Medical Center.  Something I want to do that I'm not putting off!  It's part mindfulness (staying in the present non-judgmentally), part meditation and part Yoga.  Maybe a bit of Roman stoicism, I'll find out.  No pleading for more lashes in this course I bet!  I'm ready to put in the work.  

With thanksgiving for my long life, Nina Naomi