Greetings Readers!
Here is the fourth volume of our series — Letters to a Young Seeker (Catch up on previous volumes: Don’t Forget to Live, Break Bread with the Dead, and Live an Examined Life).
For full access to this series, Sundays with Seneca, The Wisdom of Art, and other benefits, consider becoming a paid member. If you cannot afford it, feel free to request a complimentary membership or use this discount link.
Be wise and be well!
Dear Fellow Traveler,
Life is…? How would you finish this sentence?
“Life is suffering” is how the Buddha put it in his Four Noble Truths. The Stoic philosopher Seneca might say life is uncertain; we must live here and now. Then you have people like the poet Mary Oliver calling life—precious. She famously asked, "What is it you plan to do with this one wild and precious life?"
Whether one concludes that life is suffering, uncertain, precious, and so forth, the point is to find a guiding principle to live by despite life’s circumstances. Because, in truth, life is many things. (At times, life is suffering, precious, short, unfair, an adventure, and occasionally all simultaneously.)
The phrase “carry the fire” is an idea from Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road. It has been called a love story between father and son. Despite their harsh conditions and world, the father teaches his son to “carry the fire.” The fire is a metaphor not only for the will to live but to live nobly. It’s an unwavering embrace of human goodness and hope when all seems hopeless.
