Memento Mori and Gratitude
Everything is ephemeral
This letter is adapted from the Memento Mori routines on the Stoa app.
Nothing lasts. Everything is ephemeral.
Part of internalizing this message requires pruning everything that doesn’t matter. Remove the trivial from your life. You do not have time for it.
The other aspect of this involves seizing what matters.
You can think of this as having two parts: recognition and action. recognize what matters. Don’t let it pass you by. Then act. See the good, then be it.
These are intertwined. Today, let’s focus on the first part: simply feeling gratitude for what we have.
One way to practice this is to bring to mind what we’re grateful for. The people in our life. Our health, such as it is. Our standard of living. Our ability to engage with human art and the beauty of nature.
Just bring these to mind – and then imagine your life as if they were gone. A life without the people we love, in poor health, without shelter or art could still be a good one. But it would be a difficult one. And there would be a real tragedy in losing all the people we love.
Take solace in the fact that this world is a fiction. But in another way, it is not. It’s a simple fact of life that everything is temporary.
So, while you can, recognize what you have. Do not take it for granted.
Do not become the person who realizes how good they had it – when they are about to lose everything. Instead, take joy in what you have now. And take as much advantage of it as you can.
Be present in your relationships. Treat your body well. Consume great art and appreciate nature. Do this before loved ones leave and your body begins to break down.
Let’s end with a line from Marcus Aurelius:
The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as if it were the last.
Meditations 7:69
Thank you for this. A lot depends on what we decide is trivial, of course. When I scroll Instagram, I rarely find particular items I actually need to see or hear. But I do routinely find things that provide laughter, wonder, and/or joy — all of which I need.
One more thing: gratitude has to have an object. Or maybe I should say that gratitude implies an object towards which gratitude is appropriate and is due. For the Stoic, who or what is that object? Since gratitude implies that a gift has been given, doesn't that object need to be a person?