← See the axis · Temporal orientation
ArgumentThe only time that is ours
Of all time, only the present belongs to us; the rest exists only in our heads.
Supports
Seneca, Epicurus · On the Shortness of Life; Letter to Menoeceus
- Look closely: the past is no more, the future is not yet. The first lives only in memory, the second only in expectation, and neither has any place but our mind. Only the present is real; it is the only time in which we can act, feel, live.
- Yet it is almost always elsewhere that we lodge our life: in regret for what was, in worry over what is coming. We endlessly defer living to a later time which, once it is the present, will likewise be spent preparing the next.
- To come back to the present, then, is not heedlessness, it is to stop absenting oneself from the only time that is real. said it long ago: life is quite long enough for whoever knows how to inhabit it, and the wise alone live fully, because they possess their present instead of spending it chasing the future. There lies a stable peace, , which depends on us alone.
Therefore So wisdom is to bring one's life back to where it takes place: not to scorn tomorrow, but to stop sacrificing to it the only day we ever have, today.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
Not at all
Entirely
Deepenings
What if there were no enduring « self »?
- Why grant such weight to past and future? Because we assume one and the same « self » running through them. doubted it: perhaps we are only a succession of states, a of perceptions with no permanent core.
- If nothing of a stable « I » truly links yesterday's child to tomorrow's old man, then to fret over this self that already is no more is to fret over a ghost; what remains, fully real, is only the instant being lived.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
Not at all
Entirely
Put to the test
Objection