October 24, 2026

Do What You Are Doing

Age quod agis.

Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, first copied this Latin maxim into his spiritual notebook as a young seminarian in Bergamo, drawing it from the old Jesuit discipline of recollection. He returned to it again and again across four decades of diary entries—as a young priest, as a Vatican diplomat stationed far from home, and later as pope facing the weight of preparing a council. For him it meant something very practical: stop letting your mind run ahead to the next task or back to the last one, and give yourself fully to what is in front of you. In a life crowded with audiences, letters, and crises, this was his stillness—not escape from the world, but whole attention inside it.