October 20, 2026

Life On Loan

Nature has given us the use of life as a loan, without fixing any day for its repayment.

Cicero wrote the Tusculan Disputations in 45 BC, months after his daughter Tullia died and while Caesar's dictatorship had pushed him out of public life, and he turned to philosophy to work through his own grief. Here he compares a lifetime to a loan from nature, one given freely but never promised for a fixed term, so every day we wake is simply more of what was never guaranteed. The Stoics taught that worrying over the due date wastes the very thing being lent, while treating each day as borrowed frees a person to use it fully instead of resenting its limits. Amor Fati in this tradition means more than tolerating the loan's terms; it means turning the loan itself into material for living well, whatever length it runs. Cicero's point is blunt: nothing was ever owed to us, so nothing taken is a loss of something that was rightfully ours.

A principle of Stoicism: Amor Fati →