The days you're spending

Count the shifts you've half-spent. Coasting through a slow afternoon resenting the clock. Burning a morning on a feud with a coworker. Drifting through tasks you could have done well, doing them just well enough to clock out. The hours weren't taken from you. You handed them over. A steady hand isn't only steady under pressure. It's steady on the dull days too, because it knows what a day is worth.

Seneca cut through the usual complaint that life is short: "we do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one, and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them" (Of the Shortness of Life I, Stewart). We act as if our supply of working days is endless, so we fritter them — and then wonder where the years went. The waste, he says, isn't fate. It's us.

This is courage worn small. It takes a kind of nerve to treat an ordinary Wednesday as something you'd answer for, to give a forgettable task your full attention because it's the day you actually have. The steady hand doesn't save itself for the big moment. It shows up for this one.