You Don’t Get To Do One Last Thing

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world.

You don't get to do one last thing. It might be important to you, it might be long planned, maybe it's unfinished business, maybe even lives depend on it. But you know what? Life doesn't care. Your life doesn't care. People get cut down in the middle of a sentence. People get cut down in the prime of life. People get cut down before they have a chance to do something they really wanted to do that really needed to be done. I can't die now, a recent US Senator joked. He had a TV show to do, he had a bill he wanted to pass.

Needless to say, that's not how it works. He passed away instead. You could leave life right now, Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. Perhaps Marcus himself had meant to find some other way to address the succession issue. Perhaps he knew he needed to do something about Commodus. But you know what? The plague didn't care, and neither will the cancer inside you, or the drunk driver on the road, or the terrorist attack about to unfold. These things will not hold on a second to let you finish. They will not cooperate with your plans. They will not coordinate with your project. They will not accommodate what you have procrastinated. If you have unfinished business, if you have something you need to get to, get to it now. If it needs to be done, do it now. Because now is your time. Now you can.

No one is guaranteed tomorrow. That's why we have to make the most of today.

Memento Mori.