Dear Fellow Mortals,
A note before we begin: This course acknowledges that our lives end.
Be gentle if you’re grieving or living with illness. The practices are invitations, not assignments, and nothing here asks you to call a loss a gift.
I hope this course provides something useful for daily life.
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 how to live: to stop postponing life, to be present for it, and to welcome each day with gratitude. ***This course is available to Dying Every Day members.
The Limit: Your Time is Not Endless
Remember to Live (Day 1 of 5)
There are things most of us intend to do someday.
Someday we will call the friend we have been meaning to call. Take the trip. Read the book. Spend more time outside. Sit down with our parents and ask the questions we keep assuming there will be time to ask.
We will become less hurried when work settles down, more present when the children are older, more attentive when the project is finished. We will make room for what matters once the immediate demands of life loosen their grip.
There is nothing foolish about planning for the future. Much of a good life depends upon our ability to prepare, postpone gratification, and sacrifice something now for something later. But hidden inside the word someday is an assumption we rarely examine.
We assume there will be one.
Not forever. We know better than that. Ask almost anyone whether life is finite and they will answer correctly. We know people die. We know we will die.
The difficulty is not understanding mortality. It is remembering it while we live.
Tolstoy gave that difficulty its most famous form. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a respectable judge in his forties falls ill and slowly realizes that he is dying.
As a schoolboy, he had learned a simple piece of logic:
“Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal.”
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The syllogism, Tolstoy writes, had always seemed correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. Caius was an abstraction. Ivan was little Vanya, who had loved a striped leather ball, kissed his mother’s hand, and fallen in love. Death was right for Caius. For Ivan, it was altogether a different matter.
We will come back to Ivan Ilyich later in the course. For now, notice how familiar his mistake is. He never doubted that people die. He simply never applied the knowledge to himself, until his own body forced him to.
Nearly two thousand years ago, Seneca noticed how strangely human beings behave around time.
In On the Shortness of Life, he describes people who carefully protect their property while allowing their days to be consumed by obligations, ambitions, distractions, and demands they scarcely chose. We complain that life is short, he argues, while often behaving as though our supply of time were nearly inexhaustible.
His point can easily be reduced to time-management advice, but it is more unsettling than that. Seneca wants us to recognize what time actually is.
Money can be lost and sometimes earned again. Possessions can disappear and be replaced. Opportunities occasionally return.
An hour does not.
Once it has passed, it has become part of the life you have already lived.
In the first of his letters to his friend Lucilius, Seneca puts the whole problem in a single question:
“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?”
— Seneca, Moral Letters
Dying daily. Not in some dramatic sense, but in the plainest one: each day we spend is a day of life that will not come again. Death, Seneca goes on, is not only ahead of us. Most of it is already behind us, in the years we have lived.
We rarely experience time this way. We tend to imagine it as a container through which life moves. A meeting takes an hour. The commute takes forty minutes. An evening disappears into a screen. A year passes while we wait for circumstances to improve.
Then we wonder where the time went.
But the time did not go anywhere.
The time was the life.
That is the first idea I want you to practice in this course. Not life is short. Not you could die tomorrow.
Something quieter: This counts.
This morning counts. This conversation counts. This ordinary Tuesday counts. Not because every moment must become profound, but because there is no separate supply of life waiting beyond the hours we are living now.
To remember the limit is not to become preoccupied with death.
It is to remember that your life has an edge.
You cannot see exactly where that edge lies. Perhaps it is decades away. Perhaps not. That uncertainty belongs to being mortal. But there is a boundary, and the existence of that boundary changes the meaning of what lies inside it.
Imagine a book with an unlimited number of pages. You could postpone an important chapter indefinitely, skip passages carelessly, begin again whenever you wished. There would always be another page.
A human life is not like that.
Pages are being turned whether or not we are paying attention.
This does not mean we should panic and begin squeezing maximum experience from whatever pages remain. That is merely another way of becoming enslaved to time.
Limits change what things mean.
