Welcome to Morning Pages, a newsletter sharing inspirations to help you cultivate creativity and fulfillment.
Hi friends,
This past week filled me with some heavy emotions. The design community lost a wonderful leader and human: Mike Kruzeniski. I owe so much of my personal and career growth to him. I wouldn’t be the same person without his trust and support in me throughout the years.
Although his life was cut short by cancer, it was evident that he had an outsized positive impact on the lives and careers of many people. In his last few years, he dedicated his energy towards the most challenging issues like climate science and healthcare reform. This would have been the work of his lifetime.
He poured his heart into making the world a better place. To me, it felt like he was making the best of every second, every interaction, and every conversation. It still hurts to think that he is no longer on this earth.
Some days, I think about our lives as if we’re destined to live forever. There is an endless supply of time. Anything is possible. But this week, tracing the fond memories of Mike reminded me that how much time has already passed, and how fortunate it is to be living and to be healthy. The strange thing about being in the middle stage of your life is that you have to simultaneously live as if there will be a thousand tomorrows and live as if there is no tomorrow.
Two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote the iconic essay: On the Shortness of Life. Seneca writes that to live fully is to treat every day as though tomorrow won't arrive. Our whole future lies in uncertainty. It’s foolish to deny the present and live in a promise of the future.
Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man who is already full and satisfied food which he does not want but can hold. So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.
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.
Seneca cautions that we fail to treat time as a valuable resource, even though it is arguably our most precious and least renewable one.
You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!
No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.
On the bright side, I’m grateful that the past week reconnected many people, especially the Twitter design alumni family. This community always brought people closer during challenging times.
Lastly, you can donate to this fund to honor Mike’s legacy and support his family which was everything to him. ❤️
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