Are you Ready to Die?
Are you ready to die? I’m not, which means my philosophical training is not yet complete. I’m not a sage. As Seneca says:
“Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.” (Letters to Lucilius, IV.5)
I have always been “willing to live” in Seneca’s sense, meaning to do things in life that I found worthwhile and meaningful. From very early on, when I was in middle school, I resolved that I would become a scientist, because the human quest for knowledge and understanding seemed to me to be paramount. I was lucky enough to actually have a successful academic career as an evolutionary biologist, and it seemed like that was going to last me for a lifetime.
But then my mid-life crisis came, and I (re)discovered philosophy, both as an academic pursuit and as a way of life. In the first sense I was lucky once again, being able to switch fields and find a full time position in my new chosen vocation. In the second sense, it took the accidental discovery of Stoicism a few years back to finally provide me with a workable alternative to the Catholicism I grew up with and the secular humanism I had initially chosen to replace my religion with.
And yet, going back to Seneca, I still don’t know how to die. This thought came to the…
