We keep procrastinating and delaying things for the future. We feel we are never ready. The little moments of now have no importance to us. We keep building castles for the future. How much do we know about the future anyway? What does the future hold for us? How much do we know about it?
The little moments we have with our loved ones, we need to live to the fullest. We hardly know if they are alive tomorrow or not.
Epictetus, a stoic philosopher, said thousands of years back:
“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our actions.”
Another stoic philosopher, Seneca, talks about the shortness of life:
“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.”
Our allocated time on this planet is limited. We have to make the best of all the moments. We cannot delay things we have been waiting for because we don’t know what will happen tomorrow.