Mind The Small Debts
Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?
These were among Socrates' final words in the Phaedo, spoken to his friend Crito moments after he drank the hemlock in an Athenian prison. Even as his body grew numb and his students wept around him, he remembered a small ritual debt: a rooster owed to Asclepius, the god of healing, likely promised in an earlier prayer. It is a strange detail to survive from a death this momentous, but that is the point. Socrates treated the smallest obligation with the same care he gave the largest questions of his life, and that consistency is what integrity actually looks like.
Reflection
Socrates treated a small debt as seriously as his own death. What small commitment can I settle today?