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This is not a post about investing.

The Roman philosopher Seneca once said, life is not short but long if we know how to use it –

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

But since we often fail to use our time well, life indeed turns out to be short, or so it seems.

I was reminded of this stark reality today when God used the 13th pick to draft the shooting guard out of Lower Merion High School, Philly. RIP Kobe Bryant. Mamba out.

I also chanced upon this tweet the other day that illustrates how short life is.

A friend said something crazy to me the other day:

"You have 18 summers to enjoy with your kids. That's it."

By the time your kids turn 18, you have spent 70%+ of the total time you will spend with them. After that, it's a wild card (they are busy, you are old).

— Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) January 21, 2020

It kinda hit me as my kid is going to turn 1 years old in a week’s time and it made me think of what I could do to use life well so that, as Seneca suggests, I don’t waste my precious time chasing stuff that really makes it feel short.

We probably have around 20 years or even less of nurturing opportunity with our kids before they fully grow their wings. Hopefully, what I do with this time would be able to impact them positively.

Most of what happens to us in life is anyways beyond our control, and we must learn to let it go. We can spend all of our time looking to the future when things will finally be better, or ponder about your actions in the past and how you would have done it if you had a chance to turn back time. I have to admit I do that a lot and I miss out on the wonder of today.

Every day is an adventure and I need to approach it that way.

Cheers