The Last Time
I’ve written much more about Zen, Dzogchen, Mahamudra, and the other Buddhist traditions that have shaped the way I think. They are probably the clearest philosophical thread running through Open Doors, especially the nondual traditions that keep returning to questions of self, separation, impermanence, and what it means to actually be present for experience.
But, Buddhism is hardly the whole picture.
I’ve also written about Hindu Advaita, about Sufi Islam largely through the poetry of Rumi, and, in smaller amounts, about Christian theology and mysticism, especially figures like Meister Eckhart. These traditions obviously are not interchangeable, and I don’t want to pretend they all say the same thing. But, I’ve been drawn again and again to the places where they seem to press against similar questions: What is this thing I call myself? How much of what I take to be solid actually is? What happens when I stop insisting that reality conform to the shape I want it to have?
There is another tradition that has mattered to me too, though I’ve written much less about it.
Stoicism.
Stoicism began in ancient Greece with Zeno of Citium around the beginning of the third century BCE and was developed by thinkers including Cleanthes and Chrysippus before becoming especially influential in Rome. We know relatively little about these early Greek founders compared with the later Stoics: much of their writing has been lost, and much of what survives about them comes through later sources. Still, they can fairly be called the foundational figures of the tradition. Most people now encounter Stoicism through the later Roman Stoics: Seneca, the statesman and playwright; Epictetus, who was born enslaved and later became a teacher; and Marcus Aurelius, the emperor whose private reflections became the Meditations.
That is a strange group of people to find under one philosophical roof. An emperor, a former slave, a political insider. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different.
Yet, one of the central Stoic claims cuts across all of them: much of what happens to us is not ours to control. What remains ours, at least in some meaningful sense, is how we meet it.
I don’t mean the modern version where Stoicism gets flattened into keeping your jaw clenched while somebody tells you to optimize your morning routine. Ancient Stoicism was much richer and, in some ways, much stranger than that. It was a philosophy of virtue, reason, nature, mortality, and the limits of human control. It asked people to remember that they were temporary creatures living inside a world that did not owe them permanence.
That last part has stayed with me.
Especially the recognition that we rarely know when something is happening for the last time.
And, there is something almost too perfect about the fact that this applies to Stoicism itself. Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus helped build the philosophy, but most of their own words are gone. Their books existed. People read them, copied them, argued over them. And, at some point, there was a last copy of one of those lost works, a last person who could open it and read the whole thing. Almost certainly, nobody involved understood the moment that way. A philosophy concerned with impermanence and the limits of what we can keep has had much of its own beginning taken from us. The Greeks remain foundational, but largely at a distance, known through fragments and through the people who came after them.
There was a last time I picked Charlotte up without thinking about it.
A last time I walked easily through my house.
A last time I drove somewhere.
A last time I spoke without having to consider whether the words would come out the way I intended.
I don’t know when most of those moments happened.
That is the part that gets me.
We tend to imagine endings as events. Something announces itself. A door closes. Music swells. We understand that one period of life has ended and another has begun.
Usually, nothing like that happens.
You put your daughter down.
You get out of the car.
You walk across a room.
You finish a conversation.
And, only much later, do you realize that somewhere back there was the final time.
There is something almost cruel about that. But, I don’t think the Stoic response is supposed to be despair. It is attention.
Marcus Aurelius repeatedly reminded himself that the people and things around him would pass away, including himself. Seneca wrote obsessively about the brevity of life and how easily we spend time as though we have an unlimited supply of it. Epictetus went further still, urging people to hold what they loved with the knowledge that it was never really guaranteed to them.
That can sound grim when summarized too neatly.
I don’t think it has to be.
“This might be the last time” does not have to be a threat. It does not have to turn every breakfast, bedtime, conversation, or ordinary afternoon into some desperate exercise in appreciation. That sounds exhausting, and probably impossible.
It can simply be a fact sitting quietly underneath things.
You do not know.
That uncertainty changes the texture of an ordinary moment if you let it.
The Buddhist traditions that have mattered to me tend to approach some of this through impermanence and the instability of the self. Advaita approaches it differently, questioning the boundaries between the individual and what lies beyond it. Rumi often dissolves those same boundaries through love. Eckhart sometimes approaches them through the language of God and surrender.
Stoicism is less interested in dissolving the self than in disciplining its relationship to the world. It says, in effect: this will change. This may disappear. You cannot demand otherwise.
Pay attention anyway.
Maybe that is why it has stayed with me even as I have written much more about those other traditions.
Stoicism gave me something very simple.
You do not know which ordinary moment will someday become precious because it never happened again.
And, most of the time, neither did I.
We can never know
When the final time arrives
They didn’t either
