Epictetus wrote this. Marcus Aurelius read it and kept it.
When you are going to take anything in hand, remind yourself what manner of thing it is. If you are going to bathe, represent to yourself the incidents usual in the bath. And so when you are going to take your child in your arms, remind yourself that you love a mortal, and that not one of those things which you love is of a divine nature; but each of them is such as its nature wills; for this purpose it exists.
Or more directly, as Epictetus put it elsewhere: when you kiss your child, whisper to yourself — tomorrow, perhaps, you will die.
A professor on the BBC heard this and said it was stupid. Why would you think about death when you kiss your child?
She missed the point entirely.
What the Thought Actually Does
The thought isn’t morbid. It’s corrective.
Most of us kiss our children the way we turn a key in a lock — out of habit, barely registering it. It’s a ritual. A goodbye. Something that happens at the door before we think about traffic or the first meeting of the day.
Epictetus is describing what happens when you interrupt that habit with a single thought: this could be the last time.
If you actually think that — not as melodrama but as a real possibility — you are in that moment completely. You are not thinking about traffic. You are not anywhere else. You are in the exact present, with the exact person in front of you, because you have just reminded yourself that this person is mortal and so are you.
That’s not death-wish thinking. That’s the most alive you can be in a doorway.
What Marcus Understood About the Present
This is the same argument Marcus makes throughout the Meditations about the present moment. In Meditation VII he writes:
Wipe out the imagination. Stop pulling of the strings. Confine yourself to the present.
And elsewhere, in Meditation III.10: “Bear in mind that every man lives only in the present time, which is an indivisible point.”
The present is indivisible. You can’t cut it into a past piece and a future piece. You’re either in it or you’re not. And most of us, most of the time, are not. We’re planning the next thing, reviewing the last thing, worrying about what hasn’t happened, or replaying what has.
Thinking about death — specifically, thinking about the death of someone you love right as you’re with them — is one of the fastest known ways into the present moment. Not the only way. But a reliable one.
Marcus knew this. Epictetus knew it before him. Jimmy knows it now, reading them both on a website while you’re reading this.
The BBC Professor and the Problem With Comfort
The professor who called this stupid wasn’t being malicious. She was being comfortable.
Comfortable thinking says: keep death at a distance. Don’t bring it into the moment of affection. It doesn’t belong there. That’s morbid. That’s unhealthy.
Stoic thinking says the opposite: death belongs in every moment because every moment exists in its shadow. Pretending otherwise doesn’t protect you. It just leaves you less present than you could have been.
Marcus was fighting barbarians. Every morning he might not see the next. He didn’t write about the present moment as a yoga concept or a mindfulness exercise. He wrote about it as a military problem: you have exactly this moment. Nothing before it exists anymore. Nothing after it is guaranteed. What are you going to do with it?
Not Habit — Like It Matters
When you kiss your child out of habit, you’re doing something you’ve done a hundred times. The kiss is real. The love is real. But the presence isn’t, not fully. You’re somewhere else.
When you kiss your child like it’s the last time, something different happens. You’re there. Not because the thought is pleasant but because the thought is true. It could be the last time. Most of the time it won’t be. But the possibility, once admitted, changes the weight of the moment.
Marcus Aurelius was writing to himself on a battlefield at night. He would have understood the weight of a door.
Read the Meditations with Jimmy at readingwithjimmy.com. Questions and reactions to [email protected].