Work and Duty
This week you will examine what it means to work well, not as an abstract ideal but inside the actual relationships that structure your life. Each day's passage adds a layer: who you are, what that role demands, how those demands hold even when others fall short, and finally how all the roles you carry fit together into one life. By Saturday you will be invited to make a concrete commitment about how you show up in at least one of those roles.
Passage
Since, too, the duties that properly belong to different times of life are not the same, but some belong to the young, others to those more advanced in years, a word must be said on this distinction also. It is, then, the duty of a young man to show deference to his elders and to attach himself to the best and most approved of them, so as to receive the benefit of their counsel and influence. For the inexperience of youth requires the practical wisdom of age to strengthen and direct it. And this time of life is above all to be protected against sensuality and trained to toil and endurance of both mind and body, so as to be strong for active duty in military and civil service. And even when they wish to relax their minds and give themselves up to enjoyment they should beware of excesses and bear in mind the rules of modesty. And this will be easier, if the young are not unwilling to have their elders join them even in their pleasures.
— Cicero, On Duties 1.122
Reflection
Cicero turns to age and its particular duties, and the passage is striking because it does not flatter youth. It tells young people plainly: your inexperience is a real liability, seek the counsel of those further along, protect yourself from excess, and train for endurance. The duty of a person earlier in life is partly to stay correctable. At the same time, this passage implies something for those further along: be worth attaching to. Whatever stage of life you are in, there is someone younger watching how you carry your role, and someone older whose example you are still drawing from.
Go deeper
Who in your life is currently positioned to correct you or redirect you, and when did you last make it genuinely easy for them to do so?
Practice
The Correctable Self
Identify one person who is further along than you in some domain that matters to you, and one person who is earlier in the same domain and may be looking to you. For the first person, write one question you could ask them this week that would genuinely expose something you are uncertain about, not a question you already know the answer to. For the second person, write one thing you are currently modeling, intentionally or not, and decide whether it is worth modeling.