Moral letters to Lucilius by Seneca, Letter 1 on Saving Time: "Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay."
There is no upper limit to our desires; a house, a bigger house, a castle, a boat, a yacht, luxurious travel, food, servants. For all those we pay with our time.
But we don't exist in property, nor style, and those palaces are evanescent and within minutes, hours or months they have lost their allure.
Instead let us give what is truly ours to grateful recipients; good friends, good causes, the pleasures of existence, that what are beyond simple and becomes sublime.
Give our time with simple dignity, and then we can live a life that flows in quietly, more alike the existence of the Gods.
Farewell,
//antinous&lucilius
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