Nothing, it seems, is harder for the busy person to do than to slow down.
Seneca knew this. It was as true in Rome as it is today. That’s why he wrote with such pity about the conquerors for whom there was never enough and the lawyers, well into old age, still exhausting themselves in court. Men, all of whom were closer to their graves than they would have liked to think, arguing for clients they didn’t care about, trying to win a little more money or acclaim, none of which was going to follow them in their fast approaching deaths. Seneca must have judged himself too, for his inability to walk away earlier, when it became clear what life in Nero’s service was really going to be like—and how it would most likely end.
Yet here we all are, equally incapable of slowing down. Of stepping back or reflecting on what is important. Of finding balance. Of using stillness to our advantage.
At the end of his career, after he had been pushed out of power, the French president Charles De Gaulle was asked how he spent his days. “Ask the cat,” he replied. “We play solitaire and take walks together. It isn’t easy for a man to force himself into a discipline of idleness, but it is essential. Life is not work: to work without stopping sends a man mad. Remember that. And to want to do so is a bad sign: those of your colleagues who could not stop working were by no means the best.”
Yes, Marcus said, we ought to wear ourselves down doing what we love, but he didn’t mean that literally. Not fully. He meant that the time and the energy we allocate to a vocation every day should be something we love and something we give our all to in those hours. But to go well beyond that, to sacrifice yourself on the altar of work, that contradicts the essential Stoic virtue of moderation.
We have to know how to do nothing. We have to be able to be disciplined about our discipline. We have to know when it’s time to take a break. We have to slow down. Those who cannot are not the best. Because they have no tranquility, no perspective and no self-control.
