Reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius1 profoundly influenced my life.
I happened upon it as a sophomore in college, and like many of the great books which I discovered and which discovered something in me, I found it at the right time and it spoke to me, leaving an indelible impression on my soul2. Guilty of judging books by their cover, this translation’s cover arrested my attention and urged me to consider my own mortality:
A little flesh, a little breath, and a reason to rule them all: That is myself.
I looked upon the book and then upon myself, recognizing how, in and out, breath filling and fleeing my lungs, this little bone bag of flesh and fluid ever-churning conducted my symphony of being through the magical machine of my mind, some strange glittering neuron web of synapses flashing what constituted “I” into life.
I read the book that day. I do not believe a page existed without an annotation or a reflection or a star or heart by the time I closed it.
The cover, though, still spoke to me and made me realize my finitude and, ultimately, how everything I did and would ever do mattered. It embodies the definition for what constitutes a meaningful life. Everyone I would ever meet would, in some way, find themselves affected, whether positively or negatively, by how I conducted myself in the world—and everyone they would meet, in turn, would too, and on and on it would go, echoing into eternity in that way.
Everything I do matters. Everything you do matters. We each possess a crucial role to play in the unfolding of the universe.
I would like to share with you the ten passages—which proved challenging!—which most spoke to me and my reflections on how I experience them in the world.
Resilience
The axiomatic principle which most set my mind ablaze in reading this book rested in elevating myself above my suffering, of being able to look at setbacks, failures, ruination with objectivity, almost viewing my own life as a third-person narrator might scrutinize not only events but my reaction to them as and after they unfolded:
It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise, it cannot harm you—inside or out.
How profound! All I needed to focus upon resided solely in how I conducted myself in the world and how I reacted to the world around me. It did not mean I needed to relish misfortune, to savor tragedy, but I did need to stand vigilant against misfortune and tragedy souring my values and person. What good am I if I allow things to embitter me? Surely, this ruins my life, letting it ruin who I am toward the world and others.
It taught me that I am invincible so long as I did not allow things to destroy who I am and wanted to become. You are invincible too if you allow yourself to be kind and generous and forgiving in spite of cruelty and selfishness and bitterness.
As for how it must affect me? It needn’t. (I am cheating here by including another passage but will accept doing so as it fits thematically.)
Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable, then stop complaining … Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so—in your interest, or in your nature.
I learned to endure misfortune and tragedy and not to utter how they felt. What good did or would it do?
Lesson: Life is suffering. Transcend it. Offer beauty and grace upon receiving misfortune and tragedy.
Faults
I am guiltiest of this topic.
It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.
What good does it do me to focus upon other people’s faults or any discordance between their values and mine?
Early in the book, he opens the second section by reminding himself, “When you wake in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”
We know we will encounter these people—sometimes in ourselves—and that this remains unavoidable. Why try to escape it? It is inescapable. What matters rests upon tempering ourselves, honing our own souls, so that we might model how better to act and be in the world, not only to improve its condition but to act with kindness and to say to those around us who struggle and who may fail, “No, no, my friend. That isn’t what we’re here for. It isn’t me who’s harmed by that. It’s you.”
It is so.
Lesson: Look to myself to see how I respond to other people’s faults. To do otherwise is my own fault and I need to act better than this base version of whom I ought to be.
Care
In understanding my faults and how I react to the faults of others, I need next to treat those with whom I disagree with care. To care for others means to care for myself, to show them how to act by learning how I should act. Why?
He keeps in mind that all rational things are related, and that to care for all human beings is part of being human—which doesn’t mean we have to share their opinions.
We do not need to share their opinions, their values. We only need to care about one another. The vast majority of people simply want to live good lives and see those whom they love do the same. We simply see different paths to arrive there and possess different values about what matters along that path.
We must show kindness and care toward one another in understanding that each of us, “a little flesh, a little breath, and a reason to rule them all,” enacts our values into the world and those values clash. This is why I emphasize dialogue as the most crucial skill we need to cultivate as a species not merely to survive but also to prevail.
As I learned to care about others, I also began distancing myself from those who sought praise and recognition for their care. I saw that this care proved feigned, false, a means to preen oneself within social hierarchies and to crow about how much one cares. It felt empty and I wanted little to do with this behavior. Caring for the sake of caring felt better, especially when done discreetly or in confidence. I wanted no praise for it.
And he cares nothing for their praise—men who can’t even meet their own standards.
—And especially no praise if it comes from those whose standards prove nonexistent or unmet.
Lesson: Understand how I differ from others and how they differ from me and care about them regardless. To act otherwise makes me ugly.
Free Will
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
This adage always bothered me for its truth. We often live as though we possess a wisdom of our own—how time exists separate from us, only affecting others, how action and inaction exist solely in our past. But here the clock strikes, little sand particles straining through the hourglass. How I decide to conduct myself defines myself: in thought, speech, action.
This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
This goodness arrives in many forms. But we all know what it means to be good yet choose paths which give us social recognition or material or status gain. These all remain hollow. These symbolize a shell of goodness, an avatar to project for the audience’s approval, specious in their sanctimoniousness and superciliousness.
I realize that I must be good today for the sake of goodness and for my own sake. To be good offers its own reward and does not devalue or diminish me.
I chose this as it embodies the shallow quality of our New Year’s Resolutions which often reflect our commitment not to improving ourselves and the world around us: I resolve to do this; I am going to stop doing this beginning at the start of the month; I will start my exercise and dietary routine at the start of next week.
No: If it matters, I must do it now, not later.
Lesson: Act, like my life depends on it—because it does and I am spending it doing the things which do not matter instead of the things which do.
Failure
One passage made me bid farewell to a tendency, an inclination, toward blaming others for my station in life:
And if I’ve failed, it’s no one’s fault but mine.
I recognized the ease with which I might point to a person or an event to justify or rationalize my station in life or behavior toward others. This mindset seems contagious and exponentially destructive. It certainly would make for an existence in which I perpetually could accept victimhood and find myself at the whims of others and nature itself. The cost means denying myself the will to endure and make something of myself in spite of setback and failure and adversity. The Ancient Greeks distinguished between fate and destiny in such a way that I better understood how fate meant the cards I would find myself dealt but destiny being how I chose to play them.
Lesson: I need to hold myself accountable for what I do and what I do not do.
Guide
I possess two choices when confronted with those who make my condition worse:
People exist for one another. You can instruct or endure them.
How impatient I can be when I find failure or fault in others’ understanding of how to do things properly or better. Why would I fault a person for ignorance? A lack of standards or a lack of willingness to learn and to be seem more worthy of criticism than outright ignorance. I can either choose to endure what makes me miserable about their condition or I can teach them so that they know.
And I would hope they would do the same for me rather than ignore and judge me for my ignorance, my poor standards, my lack of drive.
We do indeed exist for one another. Shouldn’t we help one another along the way? Isn’t this what it means to be a human being, what defines us, to teach and to inspire others to want to learn?
It would seem the only way forward.
Lesson: Instead of complaining about how others conduct themselves in the world, I need to show them a better way of being if I possess those qualities. I also must identify my own weaknesses and failures and thus possess a willingness to learn from others.
Harm
I cannot fathom all the harm we do—to one another, to ourselves.
The jealous or envious thought; the unkind comment beneath the breath, behind the back; the sabotaging intent; the malicious invitation; the violent wish; the cruel boast; the insincere smile with maligned disposition—how many of these am I guilty of possessing or ushering into the world?
Do any of these speak to the history of your being and existence?
Why do we invite these fiends into our plane, welcomed into the world through the dark portal of the human heart?
To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice—it degrades you.
I am ashamed of the ways in which I not only degraded myself but, in turn, degraded others. If it were not enough, the passage continues in a way that illustrated, clearly, my weakness and failures:
And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.
I wondered how many times I ignored the voice in the back of my mind which implored me to speak forth my being into the world—only for me to deny it, to deny myself who I am, what I felt or believed to be right.
I long have considered the conscience—that strange little voice which speaks from the shadows of the mind—to be my future self, actualized, whole, reconciled, speaking to me to act myself—ourselves—into existence. I furthermore have considered our cowardice and falsehood when we ignore that voice to be its slow silencing. We begin to hear it less and less. In quieting it, over time, I do believe we mute it into nonexistence.
Lesson: Listen to my conscience and act upon the advice it counsels me. Better to be brave and truthful than cowardly and a liar.
Anger & Grief
I learned this hard lesson—again—just this morning:
How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.
How easy to succumb to the evanescent flash of emotion, to erupt with anger, consciously, or to feed upon that bitterness’s nest of snakes—and how certainly the wake of inviting these into my life unfolds, echoing long beyond the moment in the damage I do to others, to myself, and memorialized in my mind with statues of regret.
More time must be spent in repair and in forgiveness—again, to others, to myself—than if I simply allowed whatever ignited the invitation to fulminate.
Lesson: Take the time to let the moment pass and, if possible, in the moment in which I want to submit to cheap, sordid reaction, consider gratitude instead. How can I become angry or feel embittered toward another if I look upon the reasons for which I am grateful and move toward communicating with care and kindness instead?
Love
Look at our age, emblazoned with an incessantly trumpeting social media.
We seek attention and validation, a want for inclusion and fame. But in wanting, it seems meaningless, empty, an age whose adroitness for promoting and promulgating balances only in possessing little to offer, little to say. Why do we clamor?
It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people—but care more about their opinion than our own.
Of all the passages from the book, this one tormented me most. It taught me that I should not worry about how other people think or feel about me—at least not in the ways which do not matter, for learning to navigate what society deems socially acceptable matters too—but that I needed to cultivate my own opinion, to form my own opinion about the world. And when I do not possess an opinion about a matter in the world, I can choose to learn about it—and to take as long as necessary in doing so before airing my own thoughts and reflections—rather than parroting what seems broadly acceptable, rather than kowtowing to whatever appears socially or politically expedient.
It would do well by me to remember this, again and again, that even though we do love ourselves more than others, we neglect ourselves by wanting to conform to what we hope others will find favorable.
Lesson: Love myself enough to value my own opinion, my own aspirations—even if it seems a minority one, even if it means the only one.
The Good Life
The last lesson remains the simplest:
Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one.
It does not matter where or when or how I am—I can live a good life and lead others to do the same no matter where I am. I discovered this about myself in many places where I have lived, no matter the tradition or form or ceremonious duty, I possess qualities which allow me to guide others toward “the better angels of our nature.”
How do I know when or how or why to do it?
Here, I could prate about subjecting myself to the great ideas and the great books, orienting myself around them with their rigor divided by the infinite complexities of the world and blah blah blah. Or I could recognize the world more simply in the way when simplicity matters: In the moments when when I witness others doing unkind or unjust deeds, I might not turn a blind eye, I might not shrink from speaking forth conscience with kindness and compassion and understanding, I might defend those who are not present to defend their own name. Why?
Just that you do the right thing—the rest does not matter.
You know what I am talking about. Everything else is just excuses.
Lesson: Do what is right without expectation of reward and with the full knowledge of accepting the consequences—just or unjust—of my actions.
I Live with Bread Like You
What I valued most about this classic rested in learning that Aurelius did not write it as a book but as “Things to Oneself,” the original title. It matters because he composed it in reflection of his own life. He never wrote the book for others: He wrote it as reminders for himself because he knew he existed with flaws and failures and faults too—parts which complement and make a whole. What matters is what we do with and learn from them.
It speaks to me because if an emperor, educated by brilliant tutors and ruler over the great empire of the ancient world, could retire to his war tent to reflect on how to live his life better and why to improve his character, I, too, might find room for humility and self-reflection.
Couldn’t you?
If you enjoyed the read, please like this and share with those who might value it.
I originally fully read Gregory Hays’s translation but initially began reading Maxwell Staniforth’s as the cover—after whose translation of a passage I used as the inspiration for this post—caught my attention. While living abroad, I read Robin Waterfield’s translation, which comes annotated with further insights into the passages, and offers significant contextual understanding to the book.
I do realize that a semblance of “bro culture” deeply embraces Stoicism (Broicism?) but would like to look at this text not as a means of being stoic but as a means by which we each can conduct ourselves in the world to make it a better place and ourselves better beings within it.
Thank you, Kieran.
Again you do the work so that your readers may easily reflect and reset.
I appreciate your heart, humanity, and efforts to shore up our goodness.
It's reassuring to hear a kind and honest voice.
I wish you a rewarding 2024 that is filled with adventure!
All My Best,
Sherri