Begin At Once To Live And

From Letter 101 of the Epistulae Morales, one of the later letters written as Seneca faced the real possibility of his own death under Nero's increasingly paranoid rule. The instruction to treat each day as a complete life distills Stoic practice into a single discipline: by containing an entire life within a single day, you eliminate both regret for the past and anxiety about the future. Seneca would be forced to take his own life on Nero's orders in 65 AD, shortly after completing the collection.