You Never Know

It had been a tough couple months. There had been a lot at work. He had been distracted. His mind had been elsewhere. His priorities had been elsewhere.

So his wife—and his laboratory partner—put her foot down.

“I made you promise that you would join us Saturday evening,” Madam Curie would later write in a letter to her husband Pierre. A fight had followed but he had listened—he was smart enough to listen. What followed was a wonderful day, one of those wonderful family days that they just don’t make enough of.

“You laughed to see Eve [their daughter] go in all the ruts in the road and climb up on the stony places along the way,” she fondly recounted. The family rode bicycles. He had to raise the seat of his daughter’s bike, she was getting so big. They stopped and looked at plants. They chased butterflies. As they picked flowers together, it seemed like time had stopped, like the Gods had smiled on them.

But time had not stopped. The Gods had not smiled. “You brought this bouquet back to Paris with you the next day,” Madam Curie would write in a heartbreaking letter, “and it lived still when you were dead.” On April 19, 1906, Pierre was hit by a horse-drawn carriage crossing the street and fell under the wheels, causing a fatal skull fracture.

None of us know how much time we have. None of us know when the last time will be. Don’t rush through this wonderful time. Don’t choose the wrong things. Let them know how you feel about them. Show them how you feel about them. Soak this in.

It will end soon enough. One way or another.

P.S. The purpose of Memento Mori, the ancient practice of reflecting on mortality, is not about detachment from life but the exact opposite—it’s about connecting to the life we do have with gratitude and presence while we still can. “You could leave life right now,” Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. “Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

That’s why we created the Memento Mori Signet Ring to wear as a reminder to create priority and meaning in our lives and spend more time doing the things we love with the people we love. The back of the ring bears Marcus’ quote, while the front showcases the three essentials of existence: the tulip (life), the skull (death), and the hourglass (time).

Grab yours over at the Daily Stoic Store today!

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