For almost a year now, I have had a coin in my pocket. It is a memento mori medallion from the Daily Stoic shop. It is small and has three symbols pressed into the front: a skull, a flower and an hourglass. Death, life, time. On the back, inside a laurel wreath, is one line from Marcus Aurelius: ‘You could leave life right now.’ In Meditations, the sentence continues: ‘Let that determine what you do, say and think.’ The coin and my phone share a pocket, so several times a day, I reach for one and touch the other. Often, while I am looking and thinking, I end up holding the coin in my hand.
The symbols are centuries older than the coin itself. In the seventeenth century, Philippe de Champaigne painted Still Life with a Skull: a tulip, a skull, and an hourglass on a ledge. Painters called this a ‘vanitas’, and I keep coming back to how complete the image is. Three objects, and the whole subject is there: life, death, and time passing while you look.
The Stoics, Roman thinkers who meant their philosophy for daily use, came up with the habit of holding those three things together. Seneca advised an emperor, Marcus Aurelius was one: and Epictetus had been a slave. One of their practices was memento mori: remember that you will die. It is Seneca’s words that stay with me. He wrote that dying happens every minute and that time passing belongs to death already. By the end of your life, you will have died every year of your life.
Earlier this year, I watched a video by Ryan Holiday , the author of The Daily Stoic, in which he discussed this exact idea. One passage has stayed with me since then. ‘We protect our property and safeguard our money,’ he says, ‘and yet we are careless with the one thing that never comes back.’ Time is the only resource a creator cannot replenish.
So I have started to read the title of this piece as a genuine question: How do you handle your time once you accept that it is finite? In the rest of this piece, I will explain how this year with the coin has affected my daily routine, how I have allocated my time, what I have said no to this year, and what I want to leave behind when I am gone. This is the part I usually keep to myself.
