If you have ever looked at much ancient or medieval art, you’ll notice something:

Death is everywhere.

The French painter Philippe de Champaigne’s famous “Still Life with a Skull,” which shows the three essentials of existence—the tulip (life), the skull (death), and the hourglass (time). 

The beautiful anonymous German engraving from 1635 that features a standing, smiling skeleton aiming a crossbow.

The towering wall of hundreds of smiling skulls unearthed at the ruins of the Great Temple in the Aztec capital.

The famous cadaver tombs of Europe.

The plastered Jericho skulls filled with soil and decorated with seashells from some 9,500 years ago.

There’s even a church in Rome made almost entirely out of the bones of the dead priests that have worked there over the centuries. 

And this is a trend that has continued up through the modern era. One of Vincent van Gogh’s earliest works is “Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette.” There is even an early—though mostly forgotten—Walt Disney cartoon called “Silly Symphony” which is five minutes of dancing skeletons doing also sorts of funny but macabre things. And in 2007, an artist in Richmond, Virginia named Noah Scalin who spent an entire year making a “skull-a-day” out of anything he could get his hands on.

Why is death so common in art? 

It’s because death is common in life. And it was once even more common. 

Take someone like Marcus Aurelius. His father died when he was just a boy. His grandparents shortly after. He lost his adopted father and cherished mentor. Of his children, eight died before he did. His 15-year reign was flooded with wars abroad and plagues at home. 

Even his last words. In 180 CE, having led Rome through the worst of the Antonine Plague, which killed more than 10 million people, Marcus began to show symptoms of the disease. By his doctors’ diagnosis, he had only a few days to live. He sent for his five most-trusted friends to plan for his succession and to ensure a peaceful transition of power. Bereft with grief, these advisors were almost too pained to focus. “Marcus reproached them for taking such an unphilosophical attitude,” biographer Frank McLynn writes. “They should instead be thinking about the implications of the Antonine plague and pondering death in general.”

“Weep not for me,” began Marcus’s famous last words, “think rather of the pestilence and the deaths of so many others.”

Memento Mori. Remember we are mortal. 

It’s a constant theme in art because it’s a fact that’s as easy to forget as it is scary to think about. It’s unpleasant. And besides… given all our modern advancements in technology, isn’t it a little fatalistic? Isn’t there a chance we may live forever?

There’s nothing quite like a global pandemic to wake us up from our silly fantasies. 

Less than two months after the Chair of the 7th District of the New York City Council Health Committee poked fun at the “#coronavirus scare,” the now sobered Mark Levine announced the potential need for temporary graves in public parks. Parks, hospital ships, refrigerated trucks, and other “makeshift morgues” filled faster than the hospitals did and by the end of April, New York City “ran out of space” for its dead. 

Maybe we all should have been a little more prepared, a little stronger and tougher… a little less convinced that we had escaped the fate of those that lived long ago. 

They certainly tried to warn us, in their writing and by example. 

Moses said, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Michelangelo said, “No thought exists in me which death has not carved with his chisel.” The essayist Michel de Montaigne was fond of the ancient Egyptian custom where during times of festivities, a skeleton would be brought out with people cheering “Drink and be merry, for when you’re dead you will look like this.” Shakespeare wrote, “Every third thought should be my grave.” Mozart said, “As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence.” And Tolstoy said, “If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different.”

That’s over 3,000 years of wisdom on the same theme… a theme which predated and continued long after each of them… and will continue after us as well. 

For most of history, memento mori was more than “art,” it was a practice. Desks were staged with skulls to remind people of the urgency of life. On their walls hung paintings of skeletons, hour glasses, extinguished candles, wilting tulips. In their pockets they carried memento mori medallions and watch keys. It “wasn’t just a generalized response to mortality,” says Elizabeth Welch, an art curator at the Blanton Museum, “but instead specifically a performative social leveling that could be used by Late Medieval Christians to think about mortality and the inevitability of physical decay.” 

The physical manifestation of a memento mori helped our ancestors process the pain that followed them around each day. The bodies on the streets and battlefields didn’t create panic, but priority, humility, urgency, appreciation. 

I’ve talked about my own Memento Mori, a two-sided coin, before. On the front it has a rendering of Champaigne’s Still Life with a Skull painting. On the back, it has Marcus Aurelius’s quote: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Except I cut off the last part—as a reminder that there isn’t even time to go through the whole quote. 

But my real memento mori practice begins when I brush my teeth in the morning and when I brush them before bed in the evening. There, propped under my bathroom mirror, I have a chunk of an old Victorian tombstone. How it left that cemetery and came to be for sale, I don’t know and don’t want to know. 

But I know that it sobers me and sets me right each time I look at it. Because the piece had just one word on it. It says, “Dad.”

Somebody who so identified with that word they wanted it on their tombstone; who lived and died and whose gravestone eventually even fell into disrepair. Who were they? How did they pass? Are they missed? Were they famous? It doesn’t matter. They are gone now. Almost certainly, they were gone too soon. They left behind a family. They will never walk or speak or love or cry again. 

And so it will go for me. And so it will go for you. 

I said before that this theme in art continues. One of the performance artist Marina Abramovic’s most interesting pieces features her lying on her back, completely nude, mimicking those ancient cadaver tombs. Laid on top of her in the exact same position is a female skeleton, representing… “the last mirror we will all face.” It is a beautiful, haunting reminder of the “before and after” that every single living body ultimately experiences. Marina’s piece has echoes of the Latin expression Hodie mihi, cras tibi. The skeleton is saying to the artist, “Today it’s me, tomorrow it’s you,”

We must remember, especially now, that life is ephemeral, that life is finite, that life is fragile. This should humble us… but also empower us. 

It should put everything in perspective. When my son comes to the stairs and calls me to come play, I have no problem stopping because it could be the last time that he asks me. When I think about my work and phoning it in today I think about how lucky I am to have today. So I try to live—not just during a pandemic—with the awareness that I may not be spared. That a virus has no mercy. That it does not care about what I’ve built or who I am important to. 

It doesn’t care about any of us. Death is indifferent, and it is ruthlessly, inevitably victorious. 

That was the purpose of the once ever-prevalent memento mori art—to remind people that death is ever-present. 

This could be your last day on this planet. As wonderful as it would be if there was no such thing as death, we have to use death as a tool, we have to use it as a spur to move us forward, we have to use it as a reminder of what’s truly important and we have to be made better for the fact that we don’t know how much time we have. We never do. And we never will.

Memento Mori. 

It’s humbling to think that Marcus Aurelius, the head of the most powerful empire on earth, had the same amount of hours in the day as you. 

Just 24.

So how did he get it all done?

How did he have time to be a king, a philosopher, a writer, a husband? To pass laws and judge cases? To lead troops into battle and guide Rome through a terrible plague? And do this while remaining good? Without being corrupted by the temptations or the stress of his position?

Well, routine had something to do it. He was a man of habit—all the Stoics were. They understood, as Aristotle did, that we are what we repeatedly do. That excellence is a habit.

For Marcus, the day started early. “At dawn, when you awake,” he wrote, “know that you are getting up to do the work of a human being.” There was no time to stay under the covers and stay warm. 

It was early in the morning, we think, that Marcus did his journaling. He would spend a few minutes with the blank page, writing down his thoughts, clearing his mind, reminding himself of what was important. 

Next, he prepared himself for the day to come. “The people you will meet today,” he said, “will be ungrateful and mean and shortsighted and frustrating.” But Marcus knew that he couldn’t let these people implicate him in their ugliness. He had to stick to what he knew was right. 

It’s likely that Marcus tackled his most important tasks first. He didn’t believe in procrastination and wanted to tackle things when he was fresh. “Concentrate on what’s in front of you like a Roman,” he said. “Do it like it’s the last and most important thing in your life.” 

From his stepfather, Antoninus, Marcus had learned how to work long hours—how to stay in the saddle. He writes in Meditations that he admired how Antoninus scheduled his bathroom breaks so he could work for long, uninterrupted periods. 

Marcus didn’t shirk hard work. He did his duty. And he didn’t whine about it. “Never be overheard complaining,” he wrote, “not even to yourself.”

But what about stress? Marcus processed his stress by getting active. He regularly carved out time to hunt or ride on horseback. There are too many wrestling and boxing metaphors in Meditations for him not to have trained and regularly practiced those sports. 

WATCH: Daily Stoic’s video on Marcus Aurelius’ daily routine

As a Roman, he also would have regularly frequented the baths. Some of these baths, located in Budapest, still exist. You could sit in the same hot and cold thermal pools in which Marcus would have “washed away the dust of earthly life,” as he put it. You can probably see why this would have been such an important part of his daily routine—getting clean. Having some quiet. Stepping away from his work for a minute. Invigorating the body with hot and cold or maybe even a massage. 

Nearly a dozen times in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about seeking and achieving “stillness.” These moments of quiet would have been essential too. Without quiet, we can’t think. We can’t clear our minds. We can’t get the big picture. We can’t be philosophical. 

We get the sense that Marcus ate to live, rather than live to eat like some folks. He ate healthily and quickly. He didn’t indulge himself in rich foods and he didn’t care about fancy wine or gourmet cooks. Food was fuel; he got it and he moved on. 

When did Marcus do his reading? We don’t know for certain, but clearly books were a huge part of his life—as they have to be for any smart person. Marcus knew he had to read to lead, and he was always studying to get better. He preferred books to breaking news and gossip—looking always for the historical perspective. 

And then, as the day came to a close, it was time to be around family. Marcus clearly loved his children and his wife dearly. Even though he was important and famous and busy, he didn’t ignore them. 

We know that he liked to tuck his children into bed at night and indeed, the final and most philosophical part of his routine came as he put them to sleep. Kissing them, he would say quietly to himself, “Don’t rush this. This might be the last time you do this. It’s not guaranteed that either of you will make it through the night.”

So he drank the moment in. He was present. He loved them. He cherished this thing in front of him, which really was the most important thing in his life, and then he said goodnight.

Then he went to bed himself and started the whole process over again—for as long as he was fortunate enough to live.

And so we must do the same. We are what we repeatedly do, so let’s live well and practice good habits, like Marcus. Today and every day.

In 1880, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his brother, “My happiness is so great that it makes me almost afraid.” In October of that year, life got even better. As he wrote in his diary the night of his wedding to Alice Hathaway Lee, “Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about.” He would consider it to be one of the best years of his life: he got married, wrote a book, attended law school, and won his first election for public office.

The streak continued. In 1883, he wrote “I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in the cozy little sitting room, before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me, and playing backgammon with my own dainty mistress.” And that’s how he and Alice spent that cold winter as it crawled into the new year. He wrote in late January that he felt he was fully coming into his own. “I feel now as though I have the reins in my hand.” On February 12th, 1884 his first daughter was born.

Two days later, his wife would be dead of Bright’s disease (now known as kidney failure). His mother had died only hours earlier in the same house, of typhoid fever. Roosevelt marked the day in his diary with a large “X.” Next to it, he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”

As they say, life comes at you fast. 

Have the last few weeks not been an example of that?

In December, the Dow was at 28,701.66. Things were good enough that people were complaining about the “war on Christmas” and debating the skin color of Santa Claus. In January, the Dow was at 29,348.10 and people were outraged about the recent Oscar nominations. In February, when the Dow reached a staggering 29,568.57, Delta Airlines stock fell nearly 25% in less than a week, as people argued intensely over a message from Delta’s CEO about passengers reclining their seats. Even in early March, there were news stories about Wendy’s entering the “breakfast wars” and a free stock-trading app outage that caused people to miss a big market rally.

And that was just in the news. Think about what you busied yourself with at home during that same period. Maybe you and your wife were looking at plans to remodel your kitchen. Maybe you were finally going to pull the trigger on that Tesla Model S for yourself—the $150,000 one, with the ludicrous speed package. Maybe you were fuming that Amazon took an extra day to deliver a package. Maybe you were frustrated that your kid’s room was a mess. 

And now? How quaint and stupid does that all seem?

Depending on the day you look, years of market gains have now been taken back. 47 million people are projected to be added to the unemployment rolls in the US. The death count from what was dismissed as a mere respiratory flu and the left’s latest hoax is now inching towards 170,000 and there are millions more confirmed cases worldwide. There have been runs on supplies. Hospitals are maxing out ventilators. The global economy has essentially ground to a halt. 

Life comes at us fast, don’t it?

It can change in an instant. Everything you built, everyone you hold dear, can be taken from you. For absolutely no reason. Just as easily, you can be taken from them. This is why the Stoics say we need to be prepared, constantly, for the twists and turns of Fortune. It’s why Seneca said that nothing happens to the wise man contrary to his expectation, because the wise man has considered every possibility—even the cruel and heartbreaking ones.

And yet even Seneca was blindsided by a health scare in his early twenties that forced him to spend nearly a decade in Egypt to recover. He lost his father less than a year before he lost his first-born son, and twenty days after burying his son he was exiled by the emperor Caligula. He lived through the destruction of one city by a fire and another by an earthquake, before being exiled two more times.  

One needs only to read his letters and essays, written on a rock off the coast of Italy, to get a sense that even a philosopher can get knocked on their ass and feel sorry for themselves from time to time. 

What do we do?

Well, first, knowing that life comes at us fast, we should be always prepared. Seneca wrote that the fighter who has “seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent’s fist… who has been downed in body but not in spirit…”—only they can go into the ring confident of their chances of winning. They know they can take getting bloodied and bruised. They know what the darkness before the proverbial dawn feels like. They have a true and accurate sense for the rhythms of a fight and what winning requires. That sense only comes from getting knocked around. That sense is only possible because of their training.

In his own life, Seneca bloodied and bruised himself through a practice called premeditatio malorum (“the premeditation of evils”). Rehearsing his plans, say to take a trip, he would go over the things that could go wrong or prevent the trip from happening—a storm could spring up, the captain could fall ill, the ship could be attacked by pirates, he could be banished to the island of Corsica the morning of the trip.

By doing what he called a premeditatio malorum, Seneca was always prepared for disruption and always working that disruption into his plans. He was fitted for defeat or victory. He stepped into the ring confident he could take any blow. Nothing happened contrary to his expectations. 

WATCH: Ryan Holiday speaks about premeditatio malorum

Second, we should always be careful not to tempt fate. 

In 2016 General Michael Flynn stood on the stage at the Republican National Convention and led some 20,000 people (and a good many more at home) in an impromptu chant of “Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up!” about his enemy Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, he was swept into office in a whirlwind of success and power. 

Then, just 24 days into his new job, Flynn was fired for lying to the Vice President about conversations he’d had with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. He would be brought up on charges and convicted of lying to the FBI. 

Life comes at us fast… but that doesn’t mean we should be stupid. We also shouldn’t be arrogant.

Third, we have to hang on. Remember, that in the depths of both of Seneca’s darkest moments, he was unexpectedly saved. From exile, he was suddenly recalled to be the emperor’s tutor. In the words of the historian Richard M. Gummere, “Fortune, whom Seneca as a Stoic often ridicules, came to his rescue.”

But Churchill, as always, put it better: “Sometimes when Fortune scowls most spitefully, she is preparing her most dazzling gifts.”

Life is like this. It gives us bad breaks—heartbreakingly bad breaks—and it also gives us incredible lucky breaks. Sometimes the ball that should have gone in, bounces out. Sometimes the ball that had no business going in surprises both the athlete and the crowd when it eventually, after several bounces, somehow manages to pass through the net. 

When we’re going through a bad break, we should never forget Fortune’s power to redeem us. When we’re walking through the roses, we should never forget how easily the thorns can tear us upon, how quickly we can be humbled. Sometimes life goes your way, sometimes it doesn’t. 

This is what Theodore Roosevelt learned, too. 

Despite what he wrote in his diary that day in 1884, the light did not completely go out of Roosevelt’s life. Sure, it flickered. It looked like the flame might have been cruelly extinguished. But with time and incredible energy and force of will, he came back from those tragedies. He became a great father, a great husband, and a great leader. He came back and the world was better for it. He was better for it.

Life comes at us fast. Today. Tomorrow. When we least expect it. Be ready. Be strong. Don’t let your light be snuffed out.