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Life is an incredible thing. Even though it can be tough and painful. Even though it can be boring. Even though it can be scary. We all understand that we’ve been given a gift by being born, by living past infancy, by being born free—no guarantee, especially back in ancient Greece and Rome. The Stoics would talk about life and our possessions as something that is ours ‘only in trust.’ Meaning that at some point we must relinquish them, that they can be taken back from us, returned to whomever or whatever gave them to us in the first place. This language mirrors the heartbreaking phrase that sometimes appears in the writing of Jake Seliger, whom we had on the podcast a few months back. If you recall, Jake was shocked to find that he had squamous cell carcinoma, and that his prognosis was almost certainly terminal. Not just terminal…but quickly so. The interview was a very moving one, in part because Jake, reeling from multiple surgeries, quite obviously struggled even to speak. In his writings since his diagnosis—sometimes with happy news about progress in various drug trials, sometimes in frustrations over bureaucracy—Jake had had to wrestle with his looming mortality. “In computer science there is a convention in which one’s first program prints ‘Hello, world,’” he writes in one of his essays. “Now it is my turn to write ‘Goodbye, world.’ I’m crying as I write this and am sorry to have to go so soon. I have to give back the gift, though with great sadness.” As wonderful as life is, we do not actually possess it, not fully anyway. No matter how powerful or important or rich or healthy we are. Marcus Aurelius got this lesson as he buried one child after another and then faced it himself when he died of the plague which would come to bear his name. The emperor might have seemed like a god, but in the end, he was a mortal man like the rest of us. Indeed, every Stoic who was ever born had to give back the gift, every person who was ever born will. None of us will be exempted from this rule. All we can do is play with and enjoy and respect the gift while we have it. And help others do the same. Like all of us, Jake cannot escape the fortunes that fate has planned for him. But he is not alone in that fate. We are all interconnected and part of the same larger organism, the Stoic concept of Sympatheia reminds us, and so must look out for one another as much as we can. Together we can try to give Jake every last minute he deserves with his wife and family. You can help by donating to his GoFundMe here. |
