“Let Us Prepare Our Minds”: Seneca’s Invitation to Die Before Death Comes

An evocative and haunting portrayal of Seneca the Younger as a seated skeleton, draped in a Roman-style toga and lost in thought. The skeletal figure rests one hand beneath the jaw in a classic pose of philosophical pondering, while the other hand lies across his knees. At his feet: a human skull atop an old book—symbols of death, wisdom, and the impermanence of life. The scene is lit in warm, shadowy tones, resembling a baroque oil painting, and inscribed above with Latin text: “SENECA * statua vetus marm.” This image embodies the Memento Mori ethos—stoic, stark, and unflinching.

“Let us prepare our minds as if we had come to the very end of life.”
— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 4

If you found this line, it means you're already standing near the edge.
Maybe someone you loved just crossed it.
Maybe you feel time pressing in.
Or maybe you simply sensed that something inside you has already died,
and you're wondering what it means to truly live now.

Seneca wasn’t writing this from a place of panic.
He was offering a stillness — the kind that only comes when you stop pretending death is far away.

This Isn’t a Threat.

It’s a practice.

“Let us prepare our minds…”

Not our calendars.
Not our resumes.
Not our savings, our titles, our curated identities.

Our minds.

The part of us that runs from silence.
The part that clings to control.
The part that keeps pretending we have more time.

Seneca is not asking us to die.
He’s asking us to die to the illusion that we are untouchable.

To walk through life knowing we are breakable.
Perishable.
Precious.

What Happens When You Live From the End?

You stop waiting.
You start choosing.

You say what you meant to say five years ago.
You forgive — not because it erases the wound,
but because your hands are tired of holding knives.

You stop fearing failure, because there’s no failure in being real.

You hold your mother’s hand like it might be the last time —
because one day, it will be.

You laugh in the sun without needing it to be perfect.

You don’t need a second chance to be brave.
You need the awareness that you might not get one.

For Those in Grief: You’ve Already Been Initiated

If you’ve lost someone, you’ve already been forced into this knowing.
You didn’t get to choose when they died.
But you do get to choose what you do with the knowing that they did.

This is why I write eulogies.

Not to flatter the dead.
But to awaken the living.

To remind us that a life can disappear mid-sentence—
but the story doesn’t have to die with them.

A eulogy is a form of preparation, too.
A ritual of reckoning.
A last love letter folded into time.

Prepare your mind.

As if this were the end.
Because someday, it will be.

And when that day comes,
may you meet it not as a stranger to your own life—
but as someone who lived with eyes wide open.

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