Life and Death: Perfecting The Art of Killing Time

By Vithal Nadkarni

The stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a short manifesto in AD 49 against dawdlers, procrastinators and other 'time-killers' that seems as fresh and relevant today as it was 2,000 years ago.

He began with what in those days was a common complaint: That we are cursed with too short a life span, which often seemed to end just when we were getting ready for it.

Nor was it just the man in the street and the unthinking mass of people who groan over this, Seneca wrote. The same feeling lay behind complaints from even distinguished men and women - who undoubtedly had the affluence and the means to enjoy their leisure.

The problem, however, lay elsewhere. "It's not that we have too short a time to live, but that we waste a lot of it", he added. "Life is long enough, and sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were well invested", according to Seneca.

Even if we had 1,000 years to live, he said our life would still shrink into the merest span because our 'vice' of wasting our time and allowing others to trespass on it, would swallow up any amount of time that's given to us.

The Roman philosopher hence pre-empted Parkinson's Law that says work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. "Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend an entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis", wrote Mr Parkinson in his 1958 classic, Pursuit of Progress.

"An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another for hunting the spectacles, half an hour for the search of the address and so on... the total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told in this fashion may leave another (time-killer) prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil".

Seneca's prescription similarly pre-empts the catchline made famous by Nike: Just do it! Everyone hurries his life and suffers from a yearning for the future, and weariness for the present, he explained.

But the greatest hindrance to living was expectancy, which depends on the morrow and wastes today. You thus disposed of that which lay in the hands of Fortune, while letting go of that which was in your own.

Accordingly, he who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out his every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow, said the philosopher, who, incidentally, had also served as a tutor to Emperor Nero, infamous for his pyromaniac fiddling.

"Why do you delay", Seneca asks rhetorically in his essay On the Shortness of Life , "Why are you idle? Unless you seize the day, it flees. Even though you seize it, it still will flee; therefore you must vie with time's swiftness in the speed of using it, and, as from a torrent that rushes by and will not always flow, you must drink quickly".

You find the same message - postponement is the greatest waste of life - echoed in the sermon delivered by the grandsire Bhishma from his bed of arrows in the Mahabharata: "Don't wait for tomorrow", he says.

"For you never know what will happen then. Do now what you would tomorrow. That's wisdom". However, unlike Seneca, Bhishma did not downgrade the pursuit of artha, which, significantly, can be translated either as 'wealth' or 'meaning'. Arthasya purusho dasah - Man is money's slave - was Bhishma's famous exhortation.

Although he confessed to have been bound to the Kaurava king Duryodhana, Bhishma also exhorted his rival, the Pandava prince Yudhishtira, to pursue artha "always with energy and enthusiasm".

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See also: Life and Death, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)