MAKING PROGRESS EVERY DAY
Don’t demand that I should be equal to the best, but better than the worst. It’s enough for me if, every day, I reduce the number of my vices and correct my mistakes.
—Seneca, On the Happy Life 17.3
Roman Stoicism is a kind of path that focuses on making small, incremental amounts of progress each day, one step at a time. No one is perfect, and that’s why Stoicism, at least in part, is a practice: and it’s not just a practice that you undertake, but something that you practice at—in the same way a musician or an athlete practices—to get better at what you do.
Every day new situations arise that test our characters in small or significant ways, giving us ongoing opportunities to be mindful, virtuous, and to make the best (or wisest) judgments possible.
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius highlights the fact that Stoicism is a daily, incremental practice. Over the course of many days, Marcus reflected in his private journal on how to live a better life. By writing these notes to himself, he rehearsed his Stoic beliefs and reflected on how he could apply them in his life.19 That’s also one of the reasons Seneca wrote his philosophy in letters. Each day brings a new opportunity for self-reflection and progress, and a series of letters is itself “a work in progress”—just as developing one’s character is a work in progress, too.
Other Stoic exercises show progress to be incremental, like the daily review of one’s activities before bedtime, which was practiced by Seneca and other philosophers. In this exercise, Stoics would examine the mistakes they made during the day and consider how to act better in the future. As Seneca explains, after his wife has fallen asleep, “I carefully examine my entire day and review my deeds and words. I don’t hide anything from myself, and overlook nothing. For why should I fear anything from my errors, when I’m able to say: ‘Make sure you don’t do that any longer, and now I forgive you.’?”20
In the various forms of this simple practice, one asked several questions:
•Where did I go wrong?
•What did I do right?
•What did I leave undone?
•What could I do better in the future?
This was not the only kind of “philosophical exercise” practiced by the Stoics. Others are mentioned throughout this book and a short listing is given in the appendix, “Stoic Philosophical Exercises.” But as we can see, especially from this exercise, a Roman Stoic was encouraged to review his or her behavior each day, in order to make steady, incremental progress.
EXPERIENCING A SAGE-LIKE MOMENT
While none of the Stoic philosophers claimed to be a perfect sage, when I deeply study the most compelling writings of the Roman Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—I can’t believe that they didn’t experience sage-like moments. In those moments, they would have felt total peace of mind, felt in harmony with the universe, felt capable of making the best judgments, and felt a deep sense of joy. In fact, now and then, I’ve tasted these sage-like moments, too, even if they didn’t last.
According to traditional Stoic arguments, being a sage is an all-or-nothing matter. But to me, something is missing in those arguments. What is the point of aspiring to be a sage if it’s not even possible to taste what that state might be like occasionally? While our day-to-day lives may feel far from perfect, there are those rare moments, sometimes experienced in nature, when we can glimpse the sublime beauty and perfection of the world, despite what suffering or mayhem might be taking place elsewhere.
Aside from experiencing those moments, which I believe can be experienced by anyone, it doesn’t matter if we become a perfect sage. What mattered for Seneca and the Roman Stoics is that we make some kind of steady progress, enhancing our excellence of character, so that we can live good and meaningful lives, no matter what outer circumstances we might face.
For Seneca, making progress in life is not an isolated experience: it involves friendship, spending time with kindred spirits, and receiving a helping hand from others. The Stoics believed strongly in the value of human community. The highest kind of friendship, in theory, would exist between perfectly wise people. But since perfectly wise people don’t even exist (or are extremely rare), the next best kind of friendship exists between people devoted to helping each other make inner progress, to become better human beings. While all friendships have value, the most remarkable are those that help us—and others—to understand the world and ourselves more deeply.
CHAPTER 2
Value Your Time: Don’t Postpone Living
Combining all times into one makes life long.
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 15.5
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL, SUNNY FALL MORNING, WITH A slight chill in the air, and I’ve picked up a warm filter coffee to go. Now seated in my favorite restaurant, I’m ready to order a delicious breakfast. But I’m feeling especially happy this morning, as if a joyful reunion is about to take place. It’s because I’m going to spend some time with my old friend Seneca, but on a special occasion. For on this brisk but sunny morning, just as the world is coming alive and people are rushing off to work, I’m starting another reading of Seneca’s Letters, starting with the very first one.
This first letter, which is less than two pages long, is a warning about how people undervalue their time, written in a dazzling literary style. While Seneca didn’t give his letters titles, this one has been titled “On Saving Time,” or “Taking Charge of Your Time,” by different translators.
OUR MOST VALUABLE POSSESSION
Seneca believed that time is our most valuable possession. Because our lives are finite, each person has only a limited amount of time remaining. Many people, however, and for whatever reason, don’t value their time and waste their lives on meaningless pursuits. Then, as they reach the end of their lives, they finally realize the mistake they’ve made and experience a deep sense of regret.
In this first letter, Seneca is responding to Lucilius, who had written to Seneca about his desire to lead a better life, and how best to maintain his inner focus. These are the first few lines of Seneca’s response, starting at the very beginning:
LETTER 1
From Seneca to Lucilius, greetings
Continue, dear Lucilius, to free yourself: gather and protect your time, which until now was being taken from you, stolen from you, or simply vanished. Convince yourself of these words: some moments are robbed from us, some are stolen, and some just slip away.1
For Seneca, we lose much time, and much of life, through carelessness. When we are not paying attention, life just slips away. He then asks Lucilius, “Can you show me a single person who considers the worth of his time, who values the worth of each day, who realizes that he is dying every day?” And to make the matter even more pressing, Seneca adds, “We are mistaken to think that death lies in the future: much of death has already passed us by, unnoticed. Any years behind us are already in the hands of death.”2
When he wrote this, I don’t think Seneca was being unpleasant or moralizing, looking down his nose at the behavior of others and telling them how to live. Most likely, he was basing these insights on his own experience. When writing this letter, Seneca was around sixty-six years old, and if the reports from the ancient world are true, Nero was trying to poison him. In fact, around the same period Seneca wrote this letter, in another writing he looked back over his life with regret, and reflected on all the time he had wasted. As he frankly admitted, “Old age accuses me of having consumed my years in useless pursuits,” a situation Seneca was trying to remedy then, before it was too late: “Let us press on all the more and allow my work to repair the faults of a wasted lifetime.”3 If we read a bit between the lines, it’s tempting to imagine Seneca was thinking about the work he did for Nero when musing about his squandered years. For while Seneca’s work for Nero was highly lucrative in a financial sense, in the end Nero grew tired of Seneca and wanted him dead. Given that outcome, Seneca must have seen his work for Nero as being a waste of time, when he could have been doing something better. In fact, not long before he started writing the Letters, Seneca tried to disentangle himself from Nero as much as possible. Wanting to retire, Seneca made two attempts to return some of the wealth and properties he had received from Nero. But both times, Nero refused to take anything back and refused to let Seneca retire officially.