Hey Clementine,

This letter is pretty serious and very close to me, so I suggest you read it only when you are absolutely alone and mentally free.

As you get older, you will be forced to face a fundamental truth of life, and your attitude towards will probably impact the course of life more than anything else, period. Here is how I encountered and eventually embraced it.

It was the final year of college. I had opted for Marketing as an elective course because seniors had told me it was easy. On a gloomy afternoon, with heavy heavy rain pouring down, our marketing professor decided to teach us something outside the syllabus. In retrospect, I think he was feeling emotional about another batch of students approaching the finish line of their college journey. So, he told us a story.

Once, over a weekend, a man in his 40s was cleaning up his garage with his daughter. The daughter must have been 10 and was super excited as the holidays had just started. The father told the little girl to check the old boxes for anything useful while he moved the bigger objects. Suddenly, the girl came running with a piece of paper, asking him excitedly, ‘Daddy! Did you write this when you were young?’

Within a few moments of glancing at the paper, the man broke into tears. Looking at her father, the girl felt sad that she had hurt her dad… It was not the girl though, but the man who had hurt himself. The letter was his dream list from when he was 15 years old. He had even put a date on it. And like most of us, he had forgotten about it as he grew older…

To be honest, I do not remember what sir told us after this. I was busy on my phone and occasionally making fun of the story, just like the rest of the class. The “too cool for this” attitude was the way to go for us back then.

But I remember the final advice that sir gave, thankfully. He told us to never forget our passions and goals. He said, “…keep working on them consistently because bringing your goals to reality is your duty. The world will not pause to give you time for them. You have to make time. If you wait for the “perfect time”, you will soon forget about them in the busyness of life… The next time you will remember these goals will be when you are already so old that all you can do is regret.”

Even though I wrote all this in the letter, there was a period of 2-3 years after college where I had completely forgotten about this story, until it all came back to me like thunder when I read a passage from Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

It is true when people say that reading new things changes our past as well. It is a miracle how reading Seneca integrated sir’s story into my memory. Since that day, whenever I face a major life decision, I visualize myself holding the letter like the father in his story and ask, “Would this be a thing to regret on my list?” It works like a charm and gives me an instant sense of clarity. In fact, it is my go-to visualization for decision-making.

I have left my old On the Shortness of Life in my study for you, and I suggest you start reading it. Take your mom’s help and you will get it easily. It’s a thin book with a white cover. But again, those words have no meaning unless you apply them, Clementine.

Looking forward to your letter once you’re done. Go go go!

Wish you all the love

Papa