About Time, Session 1: Look Towards What You Are, Not What You Have
Please read “The Unexamined Life is Not Livable,” posted earlier this week, as a preface to our “About Time” study.
During the trial of Socrates, as recounted by Plato, Socrates spoke not just to the jury but to all Athenians when he said, “I tried to persuade each of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and rational as possible.”
Seneca wrote 500 years after Socrates and was inspired by him. Surely Socrates was among the “distinguished founders” that Seneca lauded in “On the Shortness of Life”:
Unless we prove most ungrateful, those most distinguished founders of hallowed thoughts came into being for us, and for us they prepared a way of living. We are led by the work of others into the presence of the most beautiful treasures, which have been pulled from darkness and brought to light.
Seneca added: “From no age are we debarred, we have access to all; and if we want to transcend the narrow limitations of human weakness by our expansiveness of mind, there is a great span of time for us to range over.”
In our study “About Time,” the practical advice of Seneca and Oliver Burkeman helps us “transcend the narrow limitations of human weakness.”
We begin with a thought experiment.