Salutations,

Happy Friday, everyone! The boulder’s at the top, and now we can rest. Great job pushing through the first full week of 2026. If you’re still writing 2025 when you sign the date… shame. Nonetheless, let’s finish this week strong!

Today, for our main course, we’re going to think about mortality as it relates to urgency through the lens of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius. Burning that off, we’re going to check ourselves and our direction. For the Book Nook, we’re going to open up Aurelius’ famed Meditations.

Let’s portion this out so Friday can commence, Thought Breakfast is served!!

Throughout this week, we’ve unfolded time in layers. Martin Heidegger showed us time as finitude. Marcel Proust talked about time as returning through memory, where the past embeds itself in the present. T.S. Eliot portrayed time as a gathering of past and future at a single point that we called stillness. Yesterday, Pieper showed us time as being halted and opened by leisure. Today, Marcus Aurelius shows us that time is limited, and therefore it is meaningful in itself.

In Meditations, Aurelius returns to the concept of death constantly. He doesn’t do so to frighten himself into action, but to steady himself into being.

For Aurelius, mortality asked one simple question: “What kind of person does this moment call me to be?”

To the Stoic thinker, death strips away vanity, procrastination, and performative living. Urgency, then, isn’t speed or rapidity. Urgency becomes the removal of what doesn’t matter. The Stoic understands that you don’t have to do everything. You only have to do what accords with the cardinal virtues (courage, justice, temperance, wisdom) at every moment possible.

Aurelius, through his wise predispositions, teaches us to live as though each moment is sufficient. With a moral conscience that asks what kind of person each moment can make him, he shows us that mortality + time = morally weighted urgency.

So, we have an instinctual desire for the good, but also an instinctive urgency once we’re conscious of the finitude of time. This realization can split people into two camps. Aurelius, however, gives us the distinction. Urgency is not “do more.” It’s simply “live true.”

Crack open a journal, notebook, or just a blank piece of paper.

Answer honestly, in one sentence, each of these questions:

Urgency never demands perfection. Rather, it simply sets direction.

“Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet hast not used it.
Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years.
Death hangs over thee.
While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV.17

“While it is in thy power, be good.”

Munch on that for today. Time doesn’t become meaningful because it’s filled. It’s already meaningful because it’s finite. Urgency should not be the fear of running out of time, but the gratitude for being here, now. I had fun with this topic this week, and I hope you all did too. Come back next week for another, brand new Thought Breakfast menu!

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

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast