Delimiting the present means turning one's attention away from the past and the future, in order to concentrate it upon what one is in the process of doing.
The present of which Marcus speaks is a present delimited by human consciousness. The Stoics distinguished two ways of defining the present.39 The first consisted in understanding the present as the limit between the past and the future: from this point of view, no present time ever actually exists, since time is infinitely divisible. This, however, is an abstract, quasi-mathematical division, with the present being reduced to an infinitesimal instant.
The second way consisted in defining the present with reference to human consciousness. In this case, the present represented a certain "thickness" of time, corresponding to the attention-span of lived consciousness. When Marcus advises us to "delimit the present," he is talking about this lived present, relative to consciousness. This is an important point: the present is defined by its reference to man's thoughts and actions.
The present suffices for our happiness, because it is the only thing which belongs to us, and depends upon us. For the Stoics, it was essential to distinguish between what does and does not depend upon us. The past does not belong to us, since it is definitively fixated, and the future does not depend on us, because it docs not yet exist. Only the present depends on us, and it is therefore the only thing which can be either good or bad, since it is the only thing which depends upon our will. Since the past and the future do not depend on us, they do not come under the category of moral good or evil, and must therefore be indifferent to us.�0 It is a waste of time to worry about what is long gone, or what will perhaps never occur; we must therefore
"delimit the present." "All the happiness you are trying to achieve by long, roundabout ways: you can have it all right now . . . . that is, if you leave everything past behind you, entrust the future to providence, and if you arrange the present in accordance with piety and justice. " �1
Elsewhere, Marcus describes the exercise of delimiting the present in the following terms:
if you licpnrntc from yourself, that is, from your thought . . . everything you h11\'l' 1111id or done in the past, everything that disturbs you about
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the future; all that . . . attaches itself to you against your will . . . if you separate from yourself the future and the past, and apply yourself exclusively to living the life that you are living - that is to say, the present - you can live all the time that remains to you until your death, in calm, benevolence, and serenity.0
Seneca describes the same exercise as follows:
Two things must be cut short:43 the fear of the future and the memory of past discomfort; the one does not concern me any more, and the other does not concern me yet.44
The sage enjoys the present without depending on the future . . . .
Liberated from the burden of worries which torture the mind, he does not hope for or desire anything. He does not plunge forward into the unknown, for he is happy with what he has [i.e. the present, which is all that belongs to us]. And don't believe that he is content with not very much, for what he has is everything.45
Here we witness the same transformation of the present that we encountered in Epicureanism. In the present, say the Stoics, we have everything, and only the present is our happiness. There are two reasons why the present is sufficient for our happiness: in the first place, Stoic happiness - like Epicurean pleasure - is complete at every instant and does not increase over time. The second reason is that we already possess the whole of reality within the present instant, and even infinite duration could not give us more than what we have right now.
Happiness, then - that is, for the Stoics, moral action or virtue - is always total and complete, at each moment of its duration. Like pleasure for the Epicurean sage, the happiness of the Stoic sage is perfect. It lacks nothing, just as a circle, whether it is large or small, still remains a circle. The same is true of a propitious or opportune moment or favorable opportunity: it is an instant, the perfection of which depends not on its duration, but rather on its quality, and the harmony which exists between one's exterior situation and the possibilities that one has.46 Happiness is nothing more nor less than that instant in which man is wholly in accord with nature.
Just as was the case for the Epicureans, one instant of happiness is, according to the Stoics, equivalent to an eternity. In the words of Chrysippus:
"If a person has wisdom for one instant, he is no less happy than he who possesses it for an eternity." 47 Similarly, as for the Epicureans, so for the Stoics: we will never be happy if we arc not so right now . It's now or never.
The matter is urgent : we must hurry, for death is imminent, 1md nil we require in order Lo he hnppy h1 tu "''"'' 10 he No. The 11nNt nnJ t he f'utur�· nrc
"Only tire Present is our Happiness "
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of no use. What is needed is the immediate transformation of our way of thinking, of acting, and of accepting events. We must think in accordance with truth, act in accordance with justice, and lovingly accept what comes to pass. In the words of Marcus Aurelius: "How easy it is to find oneself, right away, in a state of perfect peace of mind." 411 In other words, it is enough just to want it.
For the Stoics, as for the Epicureans, it is the imminence of death which gives the present instant its value. "We must carry out each action of our lives as if it were the last." 49 This is the secret of concentration on the present moment: we are to give it all its seriousness, value, and splendor, in order to show up the vanity of all that we pursue with so much worry: all of which, in the end, will be taken away from us by death. We must live each day with a consciousness so acute, and an attention so intense, that we can say to ourselves each evening: "I have lived; I have actualized my life, and have had all that I could expect from life." In the words of Seneca: "He has peace of mind who has lived his entire life every day. 11 5o We have just seen the first reason why the present alone is sufficient for our happiness: namely, that one instant of happiness is equivalent to a whole eternity of happiness. The second reason is that, within one instant, we possess the totality of the universe. The present instant is fleeting - Marcus insists strongly on this point51 - but even within this flash, as Seneca says,
"we can proclaim, along with God: 'all this belongs to me.' 11 52 The instant is our only point of contact with reality, yet it offers us the whole of reality; precisely because it is a passage and a metamorphosis, it allows us to participate in the overall movement of the event of the world, and the reality of the world's coming-to-be.
In order to understand the preceding, we must bear in mind what moral action, virtue, and wisdom meant for the Stoics. Moral good - for the Stoics, the only kind of good there is - has a cosmic dimension: it is the harmonization of the reason within us with the reason w�ich guides the cosmos, and produces the chain of causes and effect which makes up fate. At each moment, we must harmonize our judgment, action, and desires with universal reason. In particular, we must joyfully accept the conj unction of events which results from the course of nature. At each instant, we must therefore resituate ourselves within the perspective of universal reason, so that, at each instant, our consciousness may become a cosmic consciousness.