I'll skip the old Roman greeting and get straight to it: if you are working on your philosophy, you are well. That's the only health report that matters. The other kind — the body's — comes second and requires less effort than people think.
I'm not against physical exercise. Run, lift something heavy, jump — short efforts that tire the body quickly without wasting the day. What I'm against is the life organized around physical culture, where the hours go to oil and training and the diet of a bull, and the mind is left to starve or soften. The person who has built a magnificent body but left their thinking in disorder has built a fine house on swampy ground.
Come back to the mind. Always come back to the mind. It improves with use and with years, which is more than the body can claim. Give it the moderate, consistent exercise of reading and thinking and writing, and it will repay you in a way that no physical training can match. You can ride in a litter and read. You can walk and think. You cannot do the same with the athlete's regimen.
Now the real gift, which comes from the Greeks: the fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future.
I want you to sit with that second clause — its course lies wholly toward the future. The fool is always oriented forward, toward what hasn't arrived yet, toward what's still to be gained, toward the next thing that will finally satisfy the craving that nothing has satisfied yet. And because the future is always approaching and never arrived, the fool is always waiting, always wanting, always afraid that what they want won't come or what they have won't last.
Here's the practice I'd set against this: look backward, not forward. Not in nostalgia — in gratitude. Count what you have attained. Think how many ambitions are behind you now, already achieved and already surpassed. Think how many people are further behind you than you are behind others. Better yet: think how far ahead you are of the person you were ten years ago. You are competing with yourself, and you are winning.
Fix a limit you wouldn't want to pass even if you could. The goods that gleam from a distance stop gleaming once you've reached them and look back; they only looked large because you were small. Nothing piled up will satisfy you if nothing has satisfied you yet.
What does it cost you to want nothing further today? What would it mean to call today complete?
Ask yourself that each morning, and let it settle.
Yours, with nothing more to want today,