Memento Mori
EPISODE 059: MEMENTO MORI
The Roman stoic philosopher, Seneca, in the years before Nero went crazy and ordered the poor guy to off himself, was relentless in reminding those around him that life was short and that far from being morbid, the daily reminder to memento mori, or remember we will die, is an invitation to live that life fully and to make the most of it. And since this is a podcast about making, I thought maybe we should talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In 2010 a woman I'd never met sent me an email which, for reasons that will become obvious, has haunted me ever since. Her husband, the love of her life, was a fan of mine and he had just come through a tough fight with leukaemia. She asked if I would be willing to take some time with him, and go make photographs together if he came to Vancouver, sort of a celebration of his recovery. I said yes, of course, how could I not? But I was busy, about to travel on assignment work, and was it possible to do it in a couple months when summer rolled around and I had time to host him?
"Of course," she said, "that sounds great."
"Let’s talk soon," I said.
I got back two months later and sent an email saying, "I'm home, let’s make it happen!" And within 5 minutes was staring at a reply telling me the leukaemia had returned with speed and fury and within days her husband had gone.
As we get older I think events like this begin to happen more often and, if we are awake, change the way we see life, a growing awareness that life is not only short, but uncertainly so. Of course this awareness depends on our being awake, which is a challenge in a cultural milieu that seems so predisposed to keeping us sedated, distracted, and consuming in order to keep this sobering reality at bay. For over ten years I've been saying life is short, though sometimes, just to be contrary, I take the stoic philosopher Seneca's position, that it's not so much that life is short as it is that we waste so much of it. Life, Seneca said, is long, if you know how to use it. He might have said, "life is what you make of it," and as this is a podcast about making and everyday creativity, not only in the sense that we are creative every day but that our lives, and the days of which those lives are comprised, are our most important creation, I thought perhaps we should talk about it.
I'm David duChemin and this is episode 59 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Welcome here.
Music / Intro
As I wrote the first thoughts that eventually became this episode, my feet were up on the footstool, as they always are when I write, my socks peaking out from beneath my blue jeans, black socks that Cynthia gave me for Christmas, patterned with little white skulls that grinned back at me. Now that I think of it, she gave me skull socks last year too, which makes me wonder if she's trying to tell me something. Around my neck was, as it is now, a mala - an antique string of prayer beads from Tibet- each of the 108 beads a little skull carved from Yak bone many, many years ago, the artist now long gone. These reminders, far from being morbid are tactical reminders to me of the words of Seneca, they speak to me not only about the brevity of life, but of its value. Each time I touch them or look at them they whisper "memento mori," the latin words that implore me to remember my mortality. Words that literally mean, remember you must die.
Geez, duChemin, way to bring the room down.
We live a culture that seems to do everything within its power to sweep the idea of death and mortality under the rug. In Seneca's day, about 50 years into the common era, if you made it past infancy you could expect to live to your mid-to-late 50s. In 2021 in Canada a guy like me can expect, on average, to make it to 83. Advances in science and medicine have given us good cause for optimism and the hope that life will be longer for us than it was for Seneca, though he did beat the odds and lived to 68 before the emperor Nero took a disliking to him and ordered him to kill himself. But even if we live to 100, remembering that we've only got so many days, and have no idea how many, helps us make the very most of them.
"We are always," Seneca said, "complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them." It is not the brevity of life that Seneca is always going on about, despite naming one of his most famous essays "On the Brevity of Life" but rather the disconnect between how relatively short it is and the ways we choose to live out the days by which our lives are numbered. To Seneca, the recognition that life is short demanded action. It was an unavoidable reality, the one universal, shared, and inescapable truth of our lives, that made the choices about what we do so important.
I suppose that realization isn't inevitable. One could live oblivious to this reality, or even be reminded daily of their own death and come to the conclusion that there's just no point. If I won't be around forever, what good is any of it? Why even try?
But memento mori is not an encouragement to stop dreaming big, to stop planning, building, and filling our days with making the things that bring us challenge, flow, meaning, and joy. Memento mori is not only a reminder that our time is limited, it's also a question: is this how you want to spend your time? 85 years is only two and a half billion seconds. That's a hard number to wrap my mind around. But it's also 31,000 days and I can almost count that high. Approaching 50, I’m more than half-way in at this point. I've got what? 13,000 days ahead of me? That's assuming I make it to 85 which is not an assumption I make with all the stupid shit I manage to do to myself.
Many of you are about the same age as I am. 13,000 days. How do we want to fill them? Memento mori reminds me to fill them with the things I love, the things in which I find meaning. It sure makes saying no to other things much easier.
Far from being morbid, remembering my mortality makes my life richer, it pushes me toward action, keeps me present and awake, allows me to surrender to that over which I have no control, and to chose my experiences intentionally. What's that got to do with being creative? If creativity is about what we make and how we make it, then no act of creativity could possibly be more important than the life we make from the raw materials we have in the hours and days we've got left. And none of us has any idea how many that might be.
Memento mori is a call to make intentional choices, to be more awake and alive, and more engaged in the making of that life. Living in the awareness of how little time we have is an invitation to make choices about how we spend that time, and what we make of it. It's a moment-by-moment choice between action and passivity, presence of mind and inattentiveness, and between surrender and control. All of which define what we make of our time, and our experience of the life we make with it.
Memento mori, remembering that you will die, is a call to live a life that bends with a strong bias toward action. To do. To make. To act now and not later. It is not the panic of grabbing what you can on the way out of a burning house, it is not urgency or the hysterical need to cram it all in. It's a choice to slow down and do what is truly important to you, and to recognize that when you have limited time in which to do the things you long to do, something has to give. It's that question again: are you sure this is what you most want to be doing with your time?
When you know you have 24 hours left will you spend it on the frivolous things you now see as so relatively benign or harmless but for the hours they keep stealing from you? Will you choose to tweet those last hours away? And how is it different, really, if you've only got 24 years left rather than hours? Are those years any less precious? It's not really different at all. If how we spend our days is how we spend our lives then–24 hours or 24 years–we're really just talking about units of time already so short that the difference between them might not be as significant as we keep telling ourselves they are. We don't have 24 hours or 24 years. We have now. The time to make is now. Make a difference. Make love. Make amends. Make the most of it.
We've all got an expiry date, though it's stamped on the back where we can't see it, no matter how we twist and turn in the mirror to glimpse it. We're not meant to see it. It'll come when it comes. The uncertainty keeps us honest. Or it would if we didn't keep forgetting it was there, distracting ourselves and spending time as if it were limitless, burning through it like a billionaire spending money like he'll never run out, in the moments before he finds out he's lost it all. How differently, how much wiser, might he have spent it if he'd known? How much less might he have taken it for granted and really savoured the moments? How much more might he have shared with others?
Not to be blunt, but since we're already talking about death, and in the big picture we're all rushing headlong toward it, how much would that daily reminder help us choose to slow down and really be present. If now is all we've got, what better reason could we find to be more mindful and pay attention to the smaller experiences of which life is made? What more compelling argument could be made to stop going through life on auto-pilot and cruise control, and instead be truly present for every breath, every tactile experience, every glass of wine, every unexpected laugh or tear, every moment we spend with friends who, we should keep in mind, are stamped with an expiry date all their own, making each moment between us a miracle.
Memento mori is an invitation to pay attention. To perceive the world around you with greater acuity. To observe life with something like a hunger, and confront the full gamut of the human experience–to be more alive!–and in doing so to become the kind of artist who creates a hunger for that fuller, deeper experience in others. To ask the bigger questions. To awaken the sleepers. To splash big, bright, colours across the canvas and say, without irony, "enjoy it while you can. Feel it. Celebrate it. Make the most of it, while you can." The awareness that we will one day be absent, nothing more than a motif on a pair of socks, is an invitation to be here now. Fully present. Wide awake. Here. Now.
It's also an invitation to let go. We spend so much time clinging to that which we cannot control, things in the past, things in the future. Hours of already too-short lives spent grappling on the mat with invisible opponents, memories from long ago or worries projected far into the future. We live so much of our lives fighting things we can't control that we're left with little strength to deal with those things about which we can truly do something.
Remembering that the time we have in which to fight our battles is short, gives us leverage to choose those battles carefully and surrender to those we had no chance of winning, or those for which the cost of winning is just too high. Regret. Resentment. Wasted time, time in which we might otherwise have made something astonishing or positive, or meaningful, rather than time wasted kicking against the inevitable or the immovable; emotional energy expended on pyrrhic victories and symbolic trophies.
In light of a life with too few moments left in which to cram every good thing we can get our hearts around, isn't it time to surrender and take the bigger win, which is peace of mind, and the liberation of our time and the emotional and mental bandwidth we'd otherwise use in these fights? How much more creative might we be in that newly opened space in our lives? How much calmer? How much–and forgive me for using such a fluffy word, but how much happier might we be?
Memento mori is not a frequent reminder of death, it's a reminder to live. To be fully awake. To wonder at and explore the possibilities of a life out of which no one makes it alive or unscathed, and at the end of which there are no rewards for those who finish safely without having so much as dinged the paint along the way. Memento mori is a reminder that while there are few things you can do to add significant years to your life, you can add life to your years. The length of our days is limited and unknown, but their depth can be fathomless if we make them so. Memento mori, remember you will die, and then, in every second before that happens, don't forget to truly live.
Thank you for joining me. This podcast, like so many creative endeavors, started on a bit of whim, and as it has grown and found it's rhythm, I'm so aware that it's listeners like you that have helped me get here, with your ratings and reviews, by telling others and sharing it with your world, and more and more these days, dropping a note into my inbox to tell me what it means to you, or to share an idea. Thank you. And if this podcast is new to you, you'll find it takes a short break every 4 weeks when I send out a new issue of On The Make, which is like a written episode of this podcast, sent to your inbox every fourth Sunday morning. If you're not already getting it but you'd like to, just go to StartUglyBook.com , scroll to the bottom, and let me know where to send it. Once a month I'll draw the name of one listener to whom I'll send a signed copy of A Beautiful Anarchy, the book that started all this, as a thanks for listening. Our times together each week are a little one sided, I talk, you listen. If you ever want to flip the script on that, you can get me anytime at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Thank you again for being here. We'll talk soon. In the mean time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0