Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [46]
Surrounded as we are by all of this, we need to practice acceptance. Without disdain. But remembering that our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.
4. Focus on what is said when you speak and on what results from each action. Know what the one aims at, and what the other means.
5. Is my intellect up to this? If so, then I’ll put it to work, like a tool provided by nature. And if it isn’t, then I’ll turn the job over to someone who can do better—unless I have no choice.
Or I do the best I can with it, and collaborate with whoever can make use of it, to do what the community needs done. Because whatever I do—alone or with others—can aim at one thing only: what squares with those requirements.
6. So many who were remembered already forgotten, and those who remembered them long gone.
7. Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?
8. Forget the future. When and if it comes, you’ll have the same resources to draw on—the same logos.
9. Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy; none of its parts are unconnected. They are composed harmoniously, and together they compose the world.
One world, made up of all things.
One divinity, present in them all.
One substance and one law—the logos that all rational beings share.
And one truth . . .
If this is indeed the culmination of one process, beings who share the same birth, the same logos.
10. All substance is soon absorbed into nature, all that animates it soon restored to the logos, all trace of them both soon covered over by time.
11. To a being with logos, an unnatural action is one that conflicts with the logos.
12. Straight, not straightened.
13. What is rational in different beings is related, like the individual limbs of a single being, and meant to function as a unit.
This will be clearer to you if you remind yourself: I am a single limb (melos) of a larger body—a rational one.
Or you could say “a part” (meros)—only a letter’s difference. But then you’re not really embracing other people. Helping them isn’t yet its own reward. You’re still seeing it only as The Right Thing To Do. You don’t yet realize who you’re really helping.
14. Let it happen, if it wants, to whatever it can happen to. And what’s affected can complain about it if it wants. It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.
15. No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, “No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.”
16. The mind doesn’t get in its own way. It doesn’t frighten itself into desires. If other things can scare or hurt it, let them; it won’t go down that road on the basis of its own perceptions.
Let the body avoid discomfort (if it can), and if it feels it, say so. But the soul is what feels fear and pain, and what conceives of them in the first place, and it suffers nothing. Because it will never conclude that it has.
The mind in itself has no needs, except for those it creates itself. Is undisturbed, except for its own disturbances. Knows no obstructions, except those from within.
17. Well-being is good luck, or good character.
17a. (But what are you doing here, Perceptions? Get back to where you came from, and good riddance. I don’t need you. Yes, I know, it was only force of habit that brought you. No, I’m not angry with you. Just go away.)
18. Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What’s closer to nature’s heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed?
Can’t you see? It’s just the same with you—and just as vital to nature.
19. Carried through existence as through rushing rapids. All bodies. Which are sprung from nature and cooperate with it, as our limbs do with each other. Time has swallowed a Chrysippus, a Socrates and an