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December 1st

PRETEND TODAY IS THE END

“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.”

—SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 101.7b–8a

ive each day as if it were your last” is a cliché. Plenty say it, few
actually do it. How reasonable would that be anyway? Surely
Seneca isn’t saying to forsake laws and considerations—to find some orgy
to join because the world is ending.
A better analogy would be a soldier about to leave on deployment. Not
knowing whether they’ll return or not, what do they do?
They get their affairs in order. They handle their business. They tell their
children or their family that they love them. They don’t have time for
quarreling or petty matters. And then in the morning they are ready to go—
hoping to come back in one piece but prepared for the possibility that they
might not.
Let us live today that same way.