What matters in the grand scheme
I haven't been actively blogging, as I've been turning to meditation and journaling to process thoughts, but I wanted to share something that amused me.
When I read up about a person's life, I typically take note of their birth date to get a sense of their age. For deceased individuals, their death date is also noted, for the two days create a temporal set of book-ends to a person's life. All this, despite knowing that it's in the hyphen between dates that matters.
I was reminded of this latter idea when I came across the article on Thrasea Paetus. The abbreviation "fl." in the parenthetical next to his name is new to me; it stands for "flourished".
Neat. Typically for historic figures, "c." is given to stand in for "circa", meaning at best historians can only approximate when a person was born or when they died. In this case, it's even more pronounced: we do not know when Thrasea Paetus was born, but we know when he flourished—when he was active in the living of his life and doing things that were worthy of note.
I share this to remind myself that it's not when we arrive or depart, but what we do in our given time that matters. A life that is long does not suggest anything about the quality or meaning of that life.