Episode #19: Nothing Is Ours, Except Time

On "The Long Way To Us" and a letter from Seneca

Feb 17, 2025

I don’t really know anyone.

And even more, I don’t know this person sitting next to me during a 12-hour flight. That jacket is oversized for him, and his legs look way longer than normal. Can’t believe he’s walking barefoot on the plane. I wish I could see what she’s drawing in her notebook. From her eyes and skin color, she looks from the East. Does she draw every morning? How can they run a million-dollar startup today? I remember talking to them years ago, they were very excited about this. Sofia texted me again, I wonder if she knows I love her, it’s eleven years of selling my love as pure friendship. This band is out of the world, extremely talented people. I’d like to go on a tour with them one day. But how? Who knows if Willy understands time as we do. The vet says that dogs usually don’t get time properly as they only live in the present. Who can explain then why every time I come back after a trip he’s so excited?

I think I don’t know anyone.

But I always think about that night in July, you dressed up so well just to go to the pizza down at the street corner. Andrea says this tells so much about a person. He looks so annoyed today, it’s been one week that we don’t talk like we usually do. Tomorrow it’s Pinuccia's 80 birthday, she cooks the best food in the world. I want to live so long too.

I believe I know you.

Because when I see that look on your face, I know it means you had an amazing day at work. The dimple when you laugh it’s so you. With a new child coming, your life will be brighter than ever. I just know he’ll be a boy. Your mask may fool everyone else, not me. You can pretend to be something you’re not, surround yourself with strangers, and never look back again. But I’ll always know you.

I know it.

We live in a world of abundance, where every piece of information is either given or received, and the mind keeps following paths created by others instead of carving its own.

I invite you to reopen this email/post at different times of the day, in two months, or whenever you feel it’s the right time. New meanings will appear, or at least, this is what I hope.

A Letter From Seneca

If you pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose. What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands.

Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity,—time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.

- I. On Saving Time (Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius, 65 AD)

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