Day 141: "I commanded myself" | Dying Every Day

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Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 141.

“And so I commanded myself to live. For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live.” — Seneca, Moral Letters, 78.2

Sit with that.

Not die bravely. Not endure bravely. Live bravely.

Seneca writes these words to his friend Lucilius from the middle of an illness. Not from recovered health, looking back with the perspective of someone who has already overcome it. From within it—sleepless and worn down by something as mundane as chronic congestion. The kind of suffering that has no grandeur, no battlefield glory, no clear narrative arc. 

Just a body that keeps failing, in small and draining ways, day after day. [...]

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