Amor Fati and Memento Mori
❤️ Amor Fati:
It is so easy not to try our best in today's world. There are so many means of distractions all around us. We lose ourselves daily in the infinite scrolling on social media. Often, we try to do good and don't get the results we want. We fall back into consuming meaningless content on the web.
"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?"
--Epictetus.
It acts like a safety net for when we feel insecure, calling us to cope with our feelings instead of sitting with them. Also, being your best is not something grand that you must do to change the world. It could just be taking a couple of minutes to think about what is the best thing that I can do right now, and just doing that thing. If I can do this several times in a day, that's a good day.
Amor Fati is Latin for "love of one's fate." It means appreciating everything that happens, even pain, suffering, and loss. We often enjoy the good things that happen to us and fail to see the beauty in our failures. Suffering is also necessary and could even be good. It can harden us and set us up for success in the future. Amor Fati is a statement that abandons control over the things that we cannot change. It is a statement of radical acceptance.
💀 Memento Mori:
Remember when we were in high school and cared so much about what someone thought of us? As students graduating high school, we were so anxious about what is next. Our whole life was full of worries, excitement, fun, and anxiety that we do not even remember. Now, it is just a blip in our existence.
We have different worries and new ways to have fun. These too will become an echo in the theme of our lives. This is the nature of time, everything comes and goes. I know it is boring and cliche to say this, but death is the only thing we are entitled to. That's why the stoics say that you should meditate on your mortality. We don't get to choose how we are born or how we die, but we do get to choose how to live our lives.
"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."
--Marcus Aurelius.
The greatest and the most common obstacle we face is our impermanence. If we could be okay with our mortality, no other barrier would feel unbearable.
