You Think You Have Time
“There is one simple thing wrong with you — you think you have plenty of time” - Carlos Castaneda
How many people woke up today believing their lives stretched out in front of them for years or even decades, only to pass away unexpectedly ?
Albert Einstein died on 18th April 1955 at the age of 76, less than twenty four hours after experiencing an aneurism. Einstein was reported to have taken the draft of a speech he was preparing for an upcoming television appearance with him to the hospital. LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse captured photos of Einstein’s office and desk in Princeton New Jersey in the hours after he passed away. The photos are striking for the state of disarray and for what lies incomplete on Einstein’s desk.
Abraham Lincoln was sitting in the box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. on the evening of 14th April 1865. Waiting for the performance to start, Lincoln turned to his wife Mary and said “How I should like to visit Jerusalem sometime”. At 10:15pm John Wilkes Booth made his way to the Presidential box and shot Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln passed away several hours later at the age of 56[i].
Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a member of the German resistance who put himself in great danger helping Jewish refugees escape Germany. After travelling abroad Bonhoeffer had the opportunity to remain in the US but returned home, realising he would “have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people”. His life was cut short at the age of 39 when he was brutally executed by the Nazis. “Time is the most valuable thing that we have,” Bonhoeffer reflected, “because it is the most irrevocable.”
Being preoccupied with our mortality is unhelpful, comparable to living under the Sword of Damocles. But we shouldn’t assume we will always have more time. Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote[ii] “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? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed.”
Author Tom Rath was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer at the age of 16, a condition that results in tumours forming in his internal organs and spine. “The more I have learned on this topic the more strongly I believe It is not in anyone’s best interest to live like they have forever.” Rath says, “When you view your time as finite you build more life into each day”.
Paul Kalanithi was a Stanford educated neurosurgeon and writer who was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2013. Kalanithi passed away in 2015 at age 37. “I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything.” he wrote[iii], “Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
Appreciating our finitude can keep us focussed on what is truly important. “Everyone succumbs to finitude.” Kalanithi wrote, “… Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.” If you have been putting something important off, consider that “You could leave life right now.” as Marcus Aurelius reminded himself[iv], and “Let that determine what you do and say and think”.
[i] Hat tip to Ryan Holiday
[ii] Moral letters to Lucilius, Letter 1 On Saving Time, Seneca
[iii] When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi, 2016
[iv] Meditations 2.11, Marcus Aurelius
