I am so tired.
"4.15— Many grains of incense cast on the same altar; one falls earlier, another later, but it makes no difference at all.
4.17— Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to live. The inescapable is hanging over your head; while you have life in you, while you still can, make yourself good."
4.17— Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to live. The inescapable is hanging over your head; while you have life in you, while you still can, make yourself good."
— Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
“There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies.” - The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem.
Death is a bend in the road,
To die is to slip out of view.
If I listen, I hear your steps
Existing as I exist.
-
The earth is made of heaven.
Error as no nest.
No one has ever been lost.
All is truth and way.
-Fernando Pessoa
Some thoughts (anxiety, death, love)
Today I realized how caught in my own thoughts I’ve been for I’m not sure how long. At least this last school year. I’ve been busy with abstraction. It is such an odd feeling to suddenly look around and think: “This is actually real. I’m alive and someday I will no longer be.” I can’t really understand being alive in a weird way. I exist but I don’t know what that means. I guess it means in a fundamental way that I see, feel, taste, smell, think, and do things but even that doesn’t fully answer what being alive is. Those are descriptions but I have no idea what the cause or meaning is. I have been both anxious and extremely happy all day.
I think I’ve been anxious because I am currently taking care of the neighbor’s cat, which is dying. Also there have been rats in my house and I’ve been nervous about getting some kind of disease from them. I guess I’ve just been thinking about death and how I could die at any time and that I could also live for a long time. Both ideas make me feel anxious but I think about this quote from Epicurus and it makes me feel better:
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure”
A close friend of mine’s father died a couple months ago. At his memorial there were photos he took while he was hiking. I’ve been thinking what I would write to leave people with if I were to die and so far I have only a couple ideas. But I want to write something eventually if not sometime soon, at least just for myself to have. Maybe write one every year or whenever it seems important to me. Something else that makes me feel comforted is what Socrates says about death in The Apology. That to fear death is pointless because it is fearing the unknown, since we don’t know what happens after we die. Though, part of me is still anxious.
I hope that I would have had a good life and that I had made other people’s lives better. I’ve hurt more people than I would I have liked and from now on I want to change that.
