In the last week’s Memento Mori essay I talked about “How Death Helped Me Find Out Who I Am”.
The fact that this story called my life could come to an end made look at how would I want this story to look like.
Meditating on death, and facing the fact that my life could come to an end sooner than expected, helped me understand what kind of life do I want to lead, how do I want to spend my time, what do I want to strive towards.
But isn’t there a conflict, a paradox, in meditating on death?
Doesn’t this same death meditation tell me that my life could end at any moment?
Doesn’t that mean that there is no point in having long-term goals and looking at my life as a potentially great story, if I know it can end at any moment?
This the inner conflict I’ve faced, and decided to solve.
And once again, I tried to solve it with the help of the great art of living, or, as we like to call it, philosophy.
“Live every day as if it were your last.”
This is one of the first things that come to mind when you remind yourself that your death is inevitable and unpredictable.
Also, this phrase is something that’s often associated with a hedonistic lifestyle and pursuit of short-lived pleasure and fun.
However, death showed me who I am, and it’s the opposite of the type of person who is pursuing empty pleasures.
How can death also tell me to live every day as if it were my last and neglect my long-term goals?
The Roman Stoic Seneca offered me a different perspective.
“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life. He who has thus prepared himself, he whose daily life has been rounded as a whole, is easy in his mind.”
First, how would one live a day that one knew was his or her last?
We could look at it as a culmination of one’s life.
There is nothing more than needs to be done.
There is no point in making commitments and having a long-term vision.
Is it really possible to live a meaningful life if one lived every day as if it really was the last day?
So how about taking Seneca’s advice and living each day as a separate life?
But what does that even mean?
This is how I understand it, and these are the questions I used in order to find the idea of what my “whole life in a single day” would look like:
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