When your spouse dies at age 62, your battle cry becomes “Life is short!” It’s like a mayday signal. “Life is short! Life is short!” In other words, “You might die, too, so DO SOMETHING!!!”

Well, yesterday, I experienced a mind shift around that battle cry. I sat in on a Zen Habits webinar that featured Joshua Becker, creator of the Becoming Minimalist blog and author of Things That Matter: Overcoming Distraction to Pursue a More Meaningful Life. He shared this quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca:

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Life is long if you know how to use it.”

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I’ll admit, I’ve never heard of Seneca. (Here’s his ancient headshot, although it looks like someone created this picture of him as he was coming out of the sauna.) He’s also known as Seneca the Younger, son of (you guessed it) Seneca the Elder, another “well-known” Roman philosopher and writer.

I pondered his quote for a while. First, because I had to. I mean, it’s long and includes extraneous words.

I recently heard the amazing author Wade Rouse give a keynote speech in which he shared that his mother “never met a period or comma in her life,” telling the same stories over and over. Wade’s father, a chemical engineer, would become annoyed, storm out of the room, and yell “LAND THE PLANE, GERALDINE!” I think Seneca could have benefited from this advice, too, so I’ll paraphrase what I think he’s saying:

“It is not that we have a short time to live, it’s that we waste a lot of it. We make it short. So don’t do that, dummy!”

He’s right. (And he would have called us “stultus,” which means “idiot” in Latin. I took four years in high school, and it’s the one word I remember.)

Turns out, Seneca lived by these words. According to Wikipedia, he wasn’t a slacker. He wrote 12 philosophical essays, 124 letters on moral issues, and nine plays (sadly, all tragedies). His life also included plenty of drama. For example, Seneca was a critic of the Roman emperor Caligula. When Claudius became emperor, he exiled Seneca to the island of Corsica after the empress accused Seneca of committing adultery with Caligula’s sister. (This was apparently fake news.) Seneca was allowed to return eight years later to tutor Nero. Unfortunately, he became collateral damage in the conspiracy to assassinate Nero due to his being complicit, and Nero ordered him to take his own life.

WOW!

After Joshua shared the quote (I’m back in modern times now, keep up), he asked, “If you died tomorrow, what would you regret not doing?”

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I thought about areas in my life where I waste time. Like tuning into reruns of Judge Judy. And Frasier. And watching Wheel of Fortune. (Don’t judge. I grew up playing cutthroat, competitive Wheel with my parents and sister every night, where we muted the commercials and gloated if we solved the puzzle first.)

Then I imagined how many big WOW! Moments I could create if I paid closer attention to how I’m spending my time! In fact, I do have a few projects that I’ve back-burnered due to “time.”

And now I’ll land the plane. Life is long enough if you’re mindful that it’s passing. So, turn off Sajak and DO SOMETHING (aut stultus eris)!