Daily Meditations · Saturday, August 15, 2026
On the honor of age
"Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it." — Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 12
The line answers a small humiliation. Seneca had ridden out to one of his country houses and found it falling apart: the walls cracking, the trees he remembered as saplings now gnarled and hollow. His farm manager blamed the age of the plane trees; Seneca realized the true ruin the man was pointing at, gently, was Seneca himself. Rather than mourn, he turned the visit into an argument for the opposite conclusion. The old house was not a defeat. It was a record of everything it had outlasted, and the same was true of the man walking through it.
This week the King Eddy in Calgary marks its 120th anniversary with a three-day festival. Built between 1905 and 1907 as the King Edward Hotel, it provided a home away from home for settlers, railway workers, and travellers, and it remains one of the oldest music venues in Canada still in operation today. A lesser building would have been cleared decades ago. This one was kept because its long life was the point: the years were not damage to erase but the very thing worth celebrating.
What in your life have you treated as worn out that is, in fact, simply well-used?
Source: studiobell.ca →
