“Death lies heavy upon one
SENECA, THYESTES, 400
who, known exceedingly well by all,
dies unknown to himself.”
In today’s entry in The Daily Stoic, Seneca implores us in the quote above to not wait until we’re at death’s door before we realize that we haven’t taken the time to get to know ourselves.
There are plenty of people in our community who are ‘larger than life’, who are well-liked and respected by all. Pillars of our community, we call them. Everyone knows them, and in some cases everyone knows all about them — what they like, what they don’t like, what their tendencies are.
How tragic then, when one of these people knows very little about themselves? Everyone else seems to be very familiar with them, but they haven’t taken the time to look deep inside and understand their own soul, and what they really want out of life, and what they want from themselves.
That is your mission in life — to truly understand yourself and invest in yourself, for that provides the greatest return possible. Focus on yourself instead of other things that you can’t control. And then you’ll be able to say that you know yourself, and you didn’t wait until it was too late.