Reflections on Seneca — Time, Fate and Path
🇰🇷 한국어로 읽기 → LIFE IS NOT SHORT — 나는 지금 어디에 있는가?
Nearly two thousand years have passed since Seneca wrote about time, fate, and the human condition. Yet his thoughts still speak to us with remarkable clarity.
What is time?
How should we face fate?
And how do we choose our path?
After many years of working with people and leading businesses across the world, his words brought me back to one simple question.
Where am I now?
Recently, I read Seneca: To You Who Are Losing Today — LIFE IS NOT SHORT.
Rather than being a direct translation of a single work by Seneca, this book brings together key ideas from several of his dialogues—including On the Shortness of Life, On Tranquility of Mind, On Leisure, On the Happy Life, and On Providence—and presents them in language for today.
Nearly two thousand years have passed, yet I was struck by how vividly the thoughts of one philosopher could still speak to me today.
Every chapter held something worth reflecting on, but when I closed the book, three words remained with me.
TIME · FATE · PATH
Time, fate, and path.
And one question remained.
Where am I now?
TIME
Seneca invites us to think about the time given to us through the past, present, and future.
The past has already gone, and the future has not yet arrived.
The only time we can actually live is the present.
Yet looking back at the past is not meaningless.
Not to return to the past, but to look at the footprints I have left behind and discover who I am now.
Where did I begin?
Whom did I meet?
What choices did I make?
And where have those choices brought me?
Following the footprints of the past eventually brings me face to face with who I am today.
And I ask myself:
Where am I now?
FATE
After many years in management, I came to realize one thing.
Business does not unfold exactly as I think or plan.
Even with a sound strategy and our best efforts, markets change, people change, and completely unexpected events arise.
Life has not been very different.
Some things happened because of choices I made, while others appeared before me without my choosing them. There were unexpected difficulties, but also opportunities and encounters I had never imagined.
We sometimes call that fate.
I do not deny fate.
But neither can we leave everything to fate.
We must keep learning, preparing, and refining ourselves.
Because even when an opportunity arrives, if we are not prepared, we may not even recognize it as an opportunity.
That is why I believe:
Refine yourself, and fate may follow.
PATH
One thought from this book stayed with me especially strongly.
When choosing a path, we should not look at how many footprints are on it, but where that path is leading.
A path is not necessarily right simply because many people have walked it.
Nor is a path necessarily dangerous simply because no one has taken it.
What matters is not the number of footprints, but Direction.
Following a path made by others often feels comfortable and safe.
But just because the whole flock moves in the same direction does not mean that direction is necessarily right.
So sometimes we need to stop and think.
Who am I?
Where am I trying to go?
To reflect, and not lose our sense of who we are.
And, when necessary, to leave the familiar path and take on a new one.
I believe that, too, is a form of Entrepreneurship we need in life.
The Stars of Muuido
The day faded on Muuido, and night arrived.
It was just the time when summer was giving way to autumn.
Perhaps because autumn was approaching,
the sky seemed higher and the air clearer.
When I looked up at the night sky, more stars than I expected came clearly into view.
It was not a sky overflowing with stars like one might see deep in the mountains or in a desert.
But it was clearly different from the sky I would casually look up at in Seoul.
Perhaps because Seneca’s words from earlier that day were still in my mind, I could not simply let the moment pass.
I stood looking at the sky for a while.
I looked for Cassiopeia, which I had learned about as a child, and then for the Big Dipper. Following those stars, I also searched for Polaris, the North Star.
As I found one star and then another, a thought suddenly came to me.
What if the place where I am standing now were a desert?
Those stars, which simply look beautiful to me, would mean something entirely different to someone lost in an endless desert.
For that person, the North Star is not something merely to admire. It is Direction.
It becomes a marker that tells you where you are
and which way you need to go.
It is the same star.
One person may pass it by without a thought,
while another looks to it to find the way.
People Who Appear Like Stars
At that moment, I thought that the connections we form with people may be much the same.
In life, there are moments when each of us meets someone whose presence becomes a gift.
Looking back on my life, I too have met such people.
Yet they did not always appear where I was deliberately looking for them.
Sometimes, in places I had never paid attention to,
through encounters I thought were mere coincidence,
I met people who unexpectedly changed the direction of my life.
Like those stars.
The stars did not suddenly appear that night.
They had probably been there all along.
Only when I raised my head and looked up
did I finally notice them.
Perhaps human connections are like that too.
Perhaps the people who became important in my life did not suddenly appear one day. Perhaps they were already there, somewhere I had simply failed to notice.
And perhaps the same is true of the Path.
Perhaps the path was not absent;
perhaps I simply had not discovered it yet.
In a desert, a single star in the sky can sometimes show the direction more accurately than countless footprints.
Could life be the same?
Rather than blindly following the road that many others take, sometimes we need to stop, look up, and consider the direction in which we ourselves are heading.
Life Is a Path We Walk with Others
Life is not a path we walk alone.
We live by meeting, connecting, and sharing our lives with many people.
During my many years as a professional executive, I too met countless people. We achieved things together, went through difficulties together, and sometimes chose different paths.
Looking back after the passage of time, it is not only business results or numbers that remain.
People remain.
There are people I am grateful for, people I miss, and people who have remained in a corner of my heart for a long time.
All those encounters and connections have made me who I am today.
Perhaps life, in the end, is the process of walking our own path while connecting with others.
Reflection and Discipline
Reading Seneca led me to reflect on one more thing.
There are things in life we cannot choose.
Trials come, and so do challenges we never expected.
But when trials come, we do not necessarily have to see them only as misfortune.
Perhaps the love God gives does not mean comfort alone. Perhaps it can also mean allowing another challenge to come to someone capable of overcoming adversity.
If so, what we can do is not settle into complacency.
We can continue learning, refining ourselves, and moving forward with discipline.
But neither should we simply rush forward without reflection.
Sometimes we need to stop and reflect.
Because if we keep walking hard without knowing our direction, we may end up farther from where we intended to go.
That is why I hold two words together:
Reflection & Discipline.
Reflect, and keep refining yourself.
Again, Where Am I Now?
Under the night sky of Muuido that evening, I thought about the footprints of the life I had walked.
Some paths I had chosen for myself; others I had entered almost as if by fate.
Along those paths I met many people, and some of those connections changed the direction of my life.
And all of it together has made me who I am today.
Seneca’s thoughts have traveled across nearly two thousand years to speak to me today.
And so I ask myself:
Who am I?
Where am I now?
And where is the path I am walking leading me?
The stars in the night sky say nothing.
But to someone who has lost the way,
one silent star can become a direction.
Perhaps the people, connections, and opportunities we encounter in life are like that too.
That is why, from time to time, we need to stop and look up.
Look at the stars,
look back at the footprints we have left,
and see where we are standing now.
And once we have found our direction, we begin walking again.
Steadily, quietly, along my own path.
