Here’s a way to feel good every single day, no matter what happens. A way to appreciate even a day stuck in the airport or putting out fires.
It’s an exercise from Seneca. He said that a person who wraps up each day as if it was the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, has a super power when they wake up.
“When a man has said, ‘I have lived!’,” Seneca wrote, then “every morning he arises is a bonus.”
And you know how it feels when you’re playing with house money or when your vacation is extended. In a word? Better. You feel lighter. Nicer. You appreciate everything. You are present. All the trivial concerns and short term anxieties go away—because for a second, you realize how little they matter.
Well, that’s how you ought to live. Go to bed, having lived a full day, appreciating that you may not get the privilege of waking up tomorrow. And if you do wake up—which we hope for all of you—it will be impossible not to see every second of the next twenty four hours as a bonus.
Because they are.
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