Perennial Meditations
Perennial Meditations is an ongoing series of short guided contemplations inspired by the writings of Stoics, saints, and sages. One quote. One meditation. One practice to carry into your day.
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Tolstoy on the Most Important Time
This is Perennial Meditations. A daily practice.
“There is only one time that is important—now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.”
— Leo Tolstoy, The Three Questions
Tolstoy was one of the most famous men in the world, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the count with the vast estate, the literary genius whose fame had arrived before he understood what it would cost him.
He spent the second half of his life convinced that all of it was precisely the wrong life.
He gave away the rights to his books. He learned to make his own shoes. He even dressed as a peasant and worked in the fields. He was, by most accounts, genuinely impossible to live with.
In The Three Questions, the story from which today’s quote comes, a king wants to know what is the right time to act, who are the right people to listen to, and what is the most important thing to do. He travels to a hermit in the woods who answers his questions not through argument but through experience. Through the immediate, unrepeatable demands of the present moment.
The hermit’s answer to all three questions is the same:
The most important time is now.
The most necessary person is the one you are with.
The most important thing is to do good to that person. Now. Here. This.
In What Men Live By, written that same year and published in the same collection, Tolstoy approached the same truth from a different angle. An angel is sent to earth and must learn three truths before he can return to heaven. He lives among ordinary people, watches how they work, worry, and plan, and gradually discovers what human beings actually live by. Not bread. Not security. Not comfort accumulated against fear.
Love. Given freely to the person who is actually there. The stranger at the door. The child in the room. The neighbor whose need is immediate.
Two stories. The same discovery.
The present moment is not one consideration among many. It is the only place where the life worth living can actually be lived.
This is what Tolstoy means when he says the present moment is the only time we have any power. Not power in the usual sense, not influence or control or the ability to shape outcomes. The power to love. To attend.
That power is available only now—not once things settle down, not in the relationship you will give your full attention to when the pressure lifts. Now. The person in front of you. The task in your hands. The moment you are in.
Tolstoy’s own life was the proof of how difficult this is to learn. He spent decades accumulating the fame and wealth he would spend the rest of his life trying to shed, increasingly aware that the life built around reputation and achievement is a life lived in the wrong tense.
Always preparing for the future.
Always accounting for the past.
Never quite here.
His three great short stories circle this same recognition from different angles. The dying Ivan Ilyich discovers too late that the life he lived was not the life that mattered. The master in Master and Man learns, in his final moments, what his servant had always known. And the angel returns to heaven with the simplest possible answer to the hardest possible question.
The simplest things. The most obvious things.
The things we spend our lives overlooking in search of something more impressive. They were there all along.
Daily Practice
Choose one person or one task right in front of you today, and give it your full attention—not the attention left over after everything else, but your complete, unhurried presence. And be careful not to plan the next thing while doing this one. Tolstoy spent forty years learning it. We can start today.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well.
J.W.
P.S. If you found today’s meditation helpful, consider sharing it with a friend!