Dear Fellow Mortals,
On most Saturdays, I plan to share one entry from Mortal: A Journal for Finite Living, a 91-day journal I’ve been putting together.
The idea behind it is simple. Our lives are finite, and remembering that can help us attend to how we actually live. Each day has a short reading on a perennial idea about how to live, usually told through a moment from a thinker’s life. Then come two questions: in the morning, “What deserves my attention today?” and in the evening, “Where did my attention actually go?”
Below the entry, you’ll find links to this week’s meditations.
Mortal: A Journal for Finite Living
Mortal is a 91-day journal that pairs a short reading from the great thinkers on how to live with two questions, one for the morning and one for the evening. It is less about death than about the days before it.
Listen to Dying Every Day on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, ...
Day 1: Leaving the Palace
Mortal: A Journal for Finite Living
According to Buddhist tradition, a king who had been told his son might renounce the world arranged a life for the boy with no hardship in it. Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, grew up among gardens and musicians, while his father kept old age, sickness, and death outside the palace walls.
One day he rode out with his charioteer and saw an old man bent over a stick. He asked what was wrong with the man.
“Age,” the charioteer said.
“Will it happen to me?”
“To you as well, and to all of us.”
On later rides he saw a sick man, then a corpse carried past with mourners behind it, and each time the answer was the same. Last he saw a wandering ascetic, head shaved, in an ochre robe, and calm. This man, the prince learned, had given up his home to look for a way out of age, sickness, and death.
The story belongs to sacred biography rather than history, and its weight falls on the question the prince asked about himself. He had never seen an old man. We have seen many and still answer that question as if it concerned someone else.
Soon afterward, he left the palace at night and became a wanderer himself.
The search for how to live begins when we admit that what happens to everyone will happen to us.
Attend
What deserves my attention today?
Review
Where did my attention actually go?
Note: The lines above are purely for visual effect.
This Week on YouTube:
Listen to Dying Every Day on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, ...
—
Thank you for reading/listening this week; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, remember to live.
J.W.
P.S. Feel free to share your thoughts or suggestions.