Remember to Live
Remember to Live is a 5-day course on the ancient art of memento mori. It explores how awareness of our mortality, within the constraints of time and attention, can teach us to live: stop postponing, be present, and welcome each day with gratitude. ***This course is available to Dying Every Day members.
The Gift: Remember to Live
Remember to Live (Day 5 of 5)
Most of what you have, you did not make.
Two days ago, we sat with Julian of Norwich for a moment and the thing in her palm, the size of a hazelnut: “all that is made.” It seemed so small it might fall into nothing, and yet she was told, “It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it.”
That day, attention led us to wonder: the moment when it breaks through familiarity and something ordinary becomes visible again. Your own hand. A bird balancing on a wire. The night sky.
Today we follow wonder, wherever it leads.
Wonder notices that something is. It does not yet ask where it came from or whether we deserved it. It simply stops us.
G. K. Chesterton, who spent much of his life trying to describe his astonishment at ordinary existence, noticed that his wonder kept turning into something else. Wonder, he wrote, has an element of praise in it.
He wrote:
“The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom.”
He added his usual mischief. Children thank Santa Claus for the toys in their stockings; why, he asked, should he not be grateful for the gift of two miraculous legs?
And then the question that mattered most to him:
“Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?”
Chesterton did not leave that question open. He had always felt life first as a story, he wrote, and a story implies a storyteller.
The rest of Orthodoxy is his account of how his gratitude found its address in the Christian faith. For him, gratitude was more than a feeling.
It was a recognition: a gift implies a giver.
Other traditions name the Giver differently, and some have no name at all. But this turn is not limited to Christianity. Even Epicurus, who expected nothing from the gods, counted gratitude as a mark of a wise life, as we shall see shortly.
That is how wonder becomes gratitude. Wonder sees what is there. Gratitude recognizes it as given: received, not earned.
This is not how we usually experience our lives. Most of what we have arrives so gradually, or so reliably, that it begins to feel like property. The body that carries us through the day. The people who are simply there. The house, the work, the ordinary morning. We stop experiencing them as given and begin experiencing them as ours. And what is ours, we come to expect.
Epictetus offered his students a strange correction:
“Never say of anything, ‘I have lost it,’ but ‘I have restored it.’”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion
The line can sound cold. In the next lines, Epictetus applies it even to the death of a child, going further than most of us can. But the principle beneath it is quieter than it first sounds. Nothing we hold was ours to begin with. It was lent.
And something lent can be returned without our having been robbed.
The Stoics used this idea to soften loss. It can also sharpen gratitude. If the people and things in my life are on loan, then each day I still have them is not a possession I am defending. It is a gift still being given.
On the first day of this course, we met a line Seneca borrowed from Epicurus:
“The fool’s life is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future.”
— Epicurus, quoted in Seneca, Moral Letters
We read it then as a warning about postponement.
Now we can see its other half. Ingratitude and anxiety are not two separate problems. A life that treats the present as a waiting room for the future cannot be grateful for the present, because it is not really in it. And a life that cannot be grateful for what it has will always be afraid of what it might lose next.
Gratitude is one way the present becomes habitable again.
Not a technique for feeling better. A way of seeing what was there all along.
So far, we've talked about gratitude for what is given. But this whole course has been about limits, and a harder question has been waiting for us.
Can we be grateful not only for the gifts of a finite life, but for the finitude itself?
