Stoic Reminders
Welcome to the second half of the year! Is the year half full or half empty? I’ll go with full… While WordPress doesn’t recognize it, I’ve written every day this year and plan to continue doing so for as long as I’m able to. I bounce around a lot with topics, but I write about what draws my attention, and believe in a healthy mix of diversity and eclectic chaos in my otherwise structured life.
Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it. Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.” – Marcus Aurelius
The reminders are always there when you pay attention. As a history buff reading some Scottish history in preparation for a fall trip I’m reading about people who have been dead for hundreds of years, but who’s lives resonate still today. I write about dancing with ghosts, and I don’t mean the kind that haunt your house, but the kind that get into your mind. I love to get to know the place where I am, and learn about the place I’m going to. History tells one story, and the place itself tells another. If you pay attention you see the old road that cuts through the forest, or an ancient stair tread that’s been worn down with thousands of footsteps over the years. What an extraordinary thing that is – a stair tread that’s born the weight of people long departed from this world. Their footstep, and mine today, each mark time as a drop of rain fills a pond.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of online research in preparation for a trip that happens in late October. It’s funny how we get so excited about a trip four months away that we neglect the day at hand. It’s okay to build plans, but there’s a lot of life to be lived until then. The second half of the year has begun, and if it goes as quickly as the first half just went I’d best get moving for there’s no time to waste.
“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day… The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” – Marcus Aurelius
Thanks for the reminder Marcus… and Ryan Holiday for the daily reminders. The analogy of balancing life’s books every day is a good one. We only have today, after all. Tomorrow isn’t promised to us, but let’s plan (and hope) for a healthy, vibrant second half of the year anyway.