On one occasion, Livius Drusus, a courageous and energetic man, had with the backing of a huge crowd gathered from all Italy, proposed new laws to combat the evil threat of the Gracchi. Seeing no future for his policy, which he could neither execute nor abandon once it had started, Drusus is reputed to have complained bitterly about the tumultuous life he had endured from the cradle, and to have declared that he was the only person who had never had a vacation - even as a boy.

Apparently, while Drusus was still a young man and dressed in the clothes of youth, he was already serving in the courts, with the precocious dexterity to persuade juries on behalf of those who were accused, and to make his influence felt with the magistrates.

How far was this drive destined to take him?

Anyone might have guessed that such intense ambition would result in great personal and public misfortune.

And so it was too late for Drusus to moan about never taking a day off when from the very beginning he had been shoving his “achievements in everyone’s face and generally being a nuisance about town.

There is some debate as to whether or not he took his own life, as he tumbled from a sudden wound in his groin, some doubting whether this fatal injury was voluntary, but no one, whether it was deserved.

It would be a waste of time to list more individuals who, though others perceived them to be the happiest of folk, have articulated their hatred for everything they ever did, and with their own lips have damned their own lives for having been wasted. But why complain? Such pointless railing changed neither themselves nor anyone else.

Besides, when these types finish venting, they typically fall back into their usual routine.

Heaven knows! Such an existence as yours, even if it lasted past a thousand years, would shrivel into the briefest flicker of a life.

The time you have, the experience of which is relative, although of course it feels like it is rushing away, by definition escapes from you quickly; because you don’t grab it firmly enough, you neither hold back nor cause to delay the fastest moving thing in the world. You let it slip away as if it were something unimportant that could easily be replaced.