📮 Letters to a Young Seeker
Letters to a Young Seeker is an ongoing series exploring the art of living. The series title is an homage to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s work Letters to a Young Poet. The term ‘Seeker’ in this context is inspired by the Delphic maxim: “Be a seeker of wisdom.” The series is exclusively available to members.
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Dear Fellow Traveler,
What does it mean to value your time? Or, put another way, what does it mean to waste time?
In a letter known today as “On Saving Time,” Seneca stressed to Lucilius: “What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?”
Likewise, the American author Annie Dillard noted,
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
These insights are relatively straightforward. But questions about the value of time lead to essential questions about life.
