Good Morning Everyone!! I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. If you noticed that I didn’t hit your inbox on Friday, then I sincerely apologize. Maybe appreciation for the present moment is the greatest lesson on gratitude after all.

This week we’re going to work our way into a new topic. Before our Thanksgiving week of Gratitude, we delved real deep into Augustine’s Confessions. This week we’ll be seeing what the thinkers have to say about reflection itself. This might include more Augustine or Marcus Aurelius, being that they became famous over their personal reflection abilities. Today, however, we’ll dive into Seneca.

For our main course today, we’ll learn about Seneca’s opinion on the importance of reflection. To burn those thought calories, we’ll expand on it by doing some personal reflection with the Time Trade Exercise. To wrap it up with our book nook, we’ll admire a line from Augustine’s Confessions that perfectly parallels with Seneca.

Let’s dive in. Thought Breakfast is served!

“Life is long if you know how to use it.” - Seneca

Think about all the times you asked yourself why time flies. Seneca addresses this in his book, On the Shortness of Life. He says that life isn’t too short. The problem lies in how we waste most of it. Before we how short life feels, let’s pause and look closer.

What does Seneca mean when he says we waste most of our lives? He’s talking about all those worries that never came to fruition. All of those times you were so caught up in rushing and routine that your consciousness of life literally slipped away and you ran on autopilot.

Seneca argues three main points:

To this, Seneca prescribes an antidote. That antidote is reflection. Reflection is the antidote to unconscious living.

You see, we don’t suffer from a limited amount of time on Earth. We suffer from distractions and noise that impede on and occupy our time on earth. Reflection is our way out of that constant rhythm of routine that allows life to slip away from us.

But Seneca is clear; reflection is not nostalgia or daydreaming. It’s not simply lounging comfortably and thinking about the past. It’s a system of evaluation, orientation, and attention. Reflection is action towards absorbing the most out of life that you possibly can.

You see, we live most of our lives externally. Seneca says we’re constantly in pursuit, avoidance, busyness, or worrying about other people’s priorities. Reflection reclaims the attention we constantly give to the external world and turns it inward. If we don’t do this, then we die in tragedy, according to Seneca. He says, “People die having never really lived.” That is 100% true. We borrow our opinions, habits, and emotions from the world around us, but rarely take the time to examine them.

Where you would ask “Where’d all my time go?” Seneca would ask “Where have I given my time away?”

We’ll throw in a little piece of psychology to see what happens in our mind with this. Modern psychology agrees with Seneca that reflection interrupts this “autopilot” we’ve been talking about. Autopilot is where our anxiety, reactivity, and most fear-based decisions come from because those emotions arise from external stimuli.

So yes, we’re finally turning inward, and life becomes richer because of it.

This exercise is about using reflection to reframe our view of time from a constraint to a choice.

Ask yourself: “What did I trade my attention for yesterday?”

Possible trades could include: stress, distraction, entertainment, obligation, comparison, etc.

The ask yourself: “Was it worth the trade?”

See what happens.

For today’s Book Nook, we’re visiting an old friend. You’re probably tired of hearing from our good friend St. Augustine. But he is a very important figure in philosophy because his humanity makes his story relatable. Whether you want to live a more holy life or simply become a better whatever you are, we can all learn from Augustine on how to realize that. Nonetheless, this will just be a short line.

Augustine says, “You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself.” - Confessions X, 27

Augustine is talking to God in this line, but the subject of that sentence can also be attributed to Seneca’s view of time wasted that we just covered. We can go a step further and attribute the “You” in this sentence to truth.

God and truth are within you, but you have to look. You have to turn inward. We’re so distracted by the mundane events of life. It’s not that we automatically hold this truth, but rather that we find it when we look inside ourselves to find it.

Reflection brings us to the place inside us where clarity lives. Not emotion, preference, or external influences… but the quiet place beneath all the noise. The outer world changes. The inner world reveals.

Munch on that today: try sitting still and noticing your thoughts. Ask yourself whether those thoughts deserve the space they’re taking.

Thanks for reading, and come back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast.

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Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast

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