"there is nothing that is harder to learn.... "

I have been reading the blog of Tim Ferriss, the author of "4 Hour Work-week" for almost a year, and find him rather fasinating. He goes well beyond 'time management".

He recently posted On The Shortness of Life by Lucius Seneca, something I had never read before. Upon reading this and linking to a few other things I am delving into the philosophy of Stoicism and I am intrigued.

There was a message in this essay that is thousands of years old, a message sent just for me:

"It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested....

...You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals...

...There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn....

...The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labour at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world—loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own."



I want to get off this merry-go-round of the same disappointment over and over. I feel like a broken record, and I'm not sure how to jump off. Or I'm just afraid of scraping my knee. Josh and I watched The Wrestler last night. For a moment, in the heartbreak of the story about a washed up man, trying desperately to get back the glory of his youth, I felt a subtle ping of hope for myself. Maybe some people start off strong, succeed early on, know their dream from the start and take it. Maybe the rest of us, find that later on, work towards it and get there later. The truth is, I would rather find my dreams in the latter part of my life then, think I'd already lived them and have little else to look forward to.

This song has been a bit of an anthem for me lately, but I think I'll look for a new song. No more waiting.