Here's something worth sitting with: no evil is great which is the last evil of all. Death arrives; it would be worth fearing if it could stay. But it must either not come, or come and be finished. The thing that shadows every other hour is, when it arrives, the end of all shadowing.
I watch people cling to life the way drowning people cling to briars in a rushing current — the briar tears them, holds them only briefly, and the current takes them anyway. The clinging costs more than it saves. Most people I know spend their lives suspended between the fear of dying and the difficulty of living, unwilling to fully commit to either, miserable in the middle.
The way out is not to stop valuing life. It's to stop needing it to last longer than it does. A thing is never lost with more distress than when we cannot imagine being without it. Practice the imagination of loss — not morbidly, not as a daily exercise in grief, but as a quiet acknowledgment that this, too, is temporary, and temporary things can still be good.
Pompey was killed by a boy and a eunuch. Crassus by a provincial commander he'd underestimated. Men who seemed untouchable, finished by the smallest available instrument of fortune. This is not a reason for despair. It's a reason to stop investing your peace in the continuation of any particular arrangement, because no arrangement is guaranteed.
The person who scorns their own life holds a power that nobody can take. Every other power depends on someone else's continued willingness to grant it.
Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.
Don't be most men.
And today's thought, which arrived from outside our school but earned its place anyway: poverty brought into conformity with the law of nature is great wealth. The law of nature is brief: avoid hunger, thirst, cold. That is the whole list. Everything else is superfluous — not evil, but unnecessary, and the pursuit of it is what wears the years away, what sends people across seas they didn't want to cross and into obligations they didn't want to carry.
What is enough is ready to hand. It always has been.
Yours, with no unnecessary weight,