Meditations
I’d been intrigued by the book Meditations, written by second-century Roman Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, for many years before finally purchasing a copy in the summer of 2019. I’d been reminded of it when conducting some online research on diaries. I’m obsessed with diaries, and when googling “first diary ever written,” Meditations popped up. While some scholars contend that the "pillow books” (so called because they were tucked in or under pillows) of ladies of the royal Japanese court in the 10th century are the first diaries ever written, others say that Meditations, written eight whole centuries earlier, is a type of diary. Though it might not contain a daily recounting of events and activities, the book’s original Greek title, To Myself (or according to scholar and translator Gregory Hays, To Himself), speaks to its deeply personal, introspective style. Meditations certainly meets my main criterion for something to be considered a diary: it was written for the writer alone.
We live in an age where there’s an audience for everything. Thanks to social media, all of our experiences are subjects of potential exploitation, and most of us are happy to do the exploiting. Pretty much everything can be shared, seen by others. Years ago, I saw a New Yorker cartoon that depicted a mother and adolescent daughter sitting side by side amidst boxes in an attic. The mother was reading an old diary, her hand covering a nostalgic smile, and the daughter was saying, “What was the point of writing a blog that nobody else could read?” Indeed, a blog is not a diary, precisely because other people read it. A blog or social media post is written with those other people in mind, with the aim to inform, entertain, provoke, what-have-you. The writer is trying to get other people’s attention for some reason; there is a goal in mind, some hoped-for impact.
Not so with a diary. It is written to oneself only and for oneself only. Yes, we can acknowledge the diarists out there who actually want future generations to read their words. We can say that they are writing with an audience in mind. But this future audience is a projection of the writer’s imagination; it is not real in the way that one’s Facebook followers are real. The writer will not ever see the future readers’ reactions or comments, because the writer will be dead. And because diaries are not written with an actual, real audience in mind, they offer a much different type of writing than any other literary form can offer. The writer is not here to entertain you, educate you, provoke you, validate you or put you in your place. The writer is here to capture whatever it is that she thinks is worth remembering about her experience of life, to process what is challenging, to savor what is sweet.
Marcus Aurelius was especially interested in the remembering. Each of Meditations’ many brief passages is a kind of reminder, a note-to-self on how to live well. Marcus often repeats himself, perhaps having forgotten his previously written reminders regarding a particular topic, or perhaps knowing the value in rephrasing things until they finally click. “Remember,” he writes, “that when it withdraws into itself and finds contentment there, the mind is invulnerable… Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts, too… Remember: you shouldn’t be surprised that a fig tree produces figs, nor the world what it produces… Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.”
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I first started reading Meditations—the 2003 Gregory Hays translation—in the summer of 2019, then put it down for some reason, and picked it back up the following spring, when I came to think of it as my pandemic survival guide. I read it, then promptly reread it, and a couple months later, I read it again. I found great comfort in Marcus’s superhuman ability to accept whatever challenges Life presented, and to trust with unshakable devotion the Intelligence guiding all phenomena.
He was born Marcus Annius Verus in A.D. 121, to a distinguished Roman family. His father died when Marcus was was very young, leaving his grandfather to raise him until Marcus was sixteen, at which time the current reigning emperor, Hadrian, himself childless, was seeking a successor. He chose the childless senator Antoninus Pius, under the condition that Antoninus would adopt Marcus, who was his nephew by marriage. So Marcus took on the family name of his adopted father and became Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Hadrian died the following year, leaving Marcus next in line for the throne. He learned much from watching his adopted father receive embassies, try legal cases, and dictate letters to deputies, and he took on more and more responsibility. On August 31st, 161, Antoninus died, and Marcus, now age 40, became emperor of Rome.
Soon after his accession, relations between Rome and the Parthian empire took a major turn for the worse. Despite his lack of military experience, Marcus managed to delegate power well enough for Rome’s army to ultimately triumph over the Parthians. But in their victorious return home from the Near East, soldiers brought with them a devastating plague. The Antonine Plague, also called the Plague of Galen (after the physician who described it, and who worked closely with Marcus), has since been compared to smallpox. Killing a ridiculous amount of people in a hideous way (COVID would be a comparable walk in the park), the Antonine Plague lasted from 165 to 180 AD. Marcus himself died in 180, but not of the plague. His health had been failing for awhile; his cause of death is unknown. He was 58 years old.
Historians tend to agree that Marcus wrote Meditations in the 170s—his last and most challenging decade. Constant fighting on the frontier, the revolt of Syria’s governor (who was conveniently assassinated by a subordinate, preventing what seemed an inevitable Civil war on Marcus’s watch), the death of his close colleague Verus, his wife Faustina, and many others, led him to seek consolation in philosophy. In the second century, philosophy was far more than an academic subject to write or argue about. It was meant to offer a “design for living,” which was something ancient religion did not provide, with its emphasis on ritual and its lack of moral and ethical guidelines.
While Marcus drew from a variety of philosophical schools when composing Meditations, it was Stoicism that he favored. Named for the “stoa,” meaning “porch,” in downtown Athens where its founder, Zeno, taught and lectured, Stoicism was further developed by Cleanthes and Chrysippus. Its principle doctrine is that the world is organized in a rational and coherent way, directed by a life force called logos. In individuals, logos is the faculty of reason, while on a cosmic level it’s the rational principle that governs the organization of the universe—synonymous with “nature,” “Providence,” or God.” So according to the Stoics, all events are predetermined. And yet man has free will, inasmuch as he chooses to accommodate the inevitable. We are responsible for our own behavior, and yet that behavior has been anticipated by the logos and is all a part of its plan. Stoics also conceived logos as the animating substance—or pneuma— that pervades the entire world, the energy that holds all objects together. When an object dies, its animating pneuma is reabsorbed into the logos as a whole.
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Beyond and also within the concept of logos, Stoicism is characterized by an emphasis on logic (the nature of knowledge), physics (the structure of the physical world), and ethics (the proper role of human beings in that world). Marcus was most interested in the latter. To play one’s proper role in the world—in other words, to be good—was of the utmost importance to him. And nothing in the world could prevent him from being good, from staying true to his nature. Therefore nothing could harm him.
Three other disciplines comprise the thematic crux of Meditations. Those disciplines are perception, action, and will. If you read my recent blog post, or my very first one, which explored Anthony de Mello’s book Awareness, you might recognize the discipline of perception, which demands that we maintain total objectivity when looking at something, when experiencing something, when thinking about something. We must see things dispassionately, just for what they are and nothing more. To do this and respond accordingly is how Anthony de Mello defines love. And to be able to see things objectively is, according to Erich Fromm, necessary for mastering the art of loving.
What typically keeps us from seeing things objectively? Inappropriate value judgments. There’s more de Mello for you. We label things. Usually the categories can be whittled down to some version of “good” and some version of “bad.” These are just interpretations, though, not true reflections of reality. Our interpretations are problematic; reality is not. And for Stoics, whatever is, is what should be. Except, of course, for our more unconscious ways of thinking. We must protect our minds from error and be ever aware of how we are perceiving things.
The discipline of action has to do with our participation in the world. Marcus and Stoics in general believed that it was the nature of human beings to be social and to serve one another. “To live as nature requires” mean to live for others and work for their collective good.
While the discipline of action governs our approach to things we can control, the discipline of will applies to things we can’t control—the things that happen to us, either because of other humans or because of nature. In close relation to the discipline of perception, the discipline of will involves accepting whatever happens, which we can only do if we are perceiving said happenings clearly, without value judgments. Epictetus (another Stoic philosopher whom Marcus quotes in Meditations) called it “the art of acquiescence.” It is a recognition that, to quote Alexander Pope, “whatever is, is right.” When we question the perfection of logos, we degrade our own logos.
The triad of perception, action, and will show up again and again in Marcus’s writings. In his introduction to the text, Gregory Hays excerpts a passage from Book 7 of Meditations as a prime example of this oft-repeated trifecta: “Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option: to accept this event with humility [will]; to treat this person as he should be treated [action]; to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in” [perception]. If you can do these things, you will be “living your brief life rightly.”
Sounds pretty liberating to me.
But then there’s always a big question mark for me when it comes to the perception piece. If nature—logos, Providence, God, Fate, what-have-you—has a perfect plan, and human beings are a part of that plan, why wouldn’t our minds—our tools for perceiving the world—also be perfect? Why would irrational things be able to “creep in” at all? Why would the logos work against itself in this way?
I don’t have an answer for that.
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I said earlier that upon first reading Meditations in 2020, it became my pandemic survival guide. It really was the perfect thing to read—and re-read, and read again—through that whole COVID experience, because it addressed everything that made life so hard at the time. Most notably, it addressed how to deal with other people when they were being stupid and absurd, and how to deal with one’s own fear of sickness and death.
There’s a theory—just a little aside here—called terror management theory, which basically says when our lives are threatened, we manage the resulting terror—our profound fear of dying—by clamping down as hard as we can on our beliefs, because our beliefs comprise our identity. Facing our potential oblivion, we become more of ourselves—or rather, more of what we believe ourselves to be. So it’s no wonder that the divisiveness in America became amplified to the nth degree during the worst of the pandemic. People became even harder to deal with. And it happened on both ends of the political spectrum. Everybody just got louder, basically, because everybody was terrified that they were about to be silenced forever by death.
When it came to his dealings with difficult people—whether a pandemic was happening or not (he experienced both ways of life)—Marcus Aurelius basically had the attitude of “of course they’re going to be like that.” He took the elements of shock and indignation—so very common in our society’s response to unwanted behavior from others—out of the equation. Don’t waste your energy on shock and indignation, he’d say. He’d probably appreciate Anthony de Mello’s refrain of “I’m an ass, you’re an ass.” Well, maybe he wouldn’t appreciate the “I’m an ass” part, but I bet he could get on board with perceiving other people as asses. And so of course they’re going to behave like asses. That is the role they’ve been assigned in this life, just as you have been assigned your particular role. And every role contributes something essential to the overall design of the universe.
So there’s no point in getting all bent out of shape when someone behaves in ways you wish they wouldn’t. That would be akin to throwing a fit if you were diagnosed with cancer. What good would that do? If cancer is the hand you’re dealt, you do what you can to get rid of it and restore health to your body, but beyond that, you accept your lot with humility. That’s what Marcus would say. And if difficult people are your plight, he’d say to do what you can, through civil dialogue, to change their behavior and/or their worldview. But there’s only so much you can do, so you do it, and otherwise you don’t let the bastards get you down. You stay out of their way, or you fight them if they’re about to harm you or someone else, but for the most part you have to accept them (there’s that discipline of will) as an integral part of the warp and woof of the cosmos, of no less—and no more—significance than you are.
But even more appreciated than Marcus’s attitude toward the conundrum of other people, is his perspective on death. Last year, in my third reading of Meditations, I noted in the margins all the mentions of death. Then I typed them up in Times New Roman 12-point font, single-spaced. The result was eight and one-fourth pages. Then I color-coded them according to theme, of which there were five. The theme that occurs the most, or what Marcus contemplates more than anything else when it comes to death and dying, is the notion that whatever happens to us is decided by Fate—i.e. Nature, God, the gods, the logos, etc. Marcus’s belief in this divine Intelligence allows him to “welcome with affection” everything that happens. In trusting that the gods would never create or transform anything in a way that didn’t perfectly support the overall design and promote the ultimate improvement of everything, he could accept his mortality—“as we accept what the doctor prescribes. It may not always be pleasant, but we embrace it—because we want to get well.”
Indeed, it is such embracing that makes us well, even if what the “doctor prescribes” is death. And of course, that is what the doctor prescribes for all of us, eventually. But from a Stoic perspective death is actually a good thing—“scheduled by the world, promoting it, promoted by it.” If the gods felt that a world without death would be best, then they would have made a world without death. So to complain about it is to abandon one’s post and “revolt against nature,” which we are meant to revere. Anger and fear do far more damage than the things that create them. Instead of seeing something as a catastrophe, we can see it as Nature’s will, and since we are part of Nature, we only hurt ourselves by resisting or resenting it. “Be satisfied,” Marcus says in Meditations, “if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don’t let anything distract you.”
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Anything—including a pandemic.
When COVID first hit the U.S., the sentiment everyone echoed was “we’re all in this together.” But we soon discovered the hollowness of that particular echo. Discovered, with much dramatic shock and dismay, how distracted some of our fellow humans had become by, say, their ideas of what freedom means. Some people didn’t want to wear masks; other people hated them for it. Both believed themselves to be in the right, and just like that we weren’t in this together anymore.
Marcus understood that true union amongst people had to happen despite differing worldviews, even if the worldviews of others might put our very lives in jeopardy. He wrote, “You are much mistaken, my friend, if you think that any man worth his salt cares about the risk of death and doesn’t concentrate on this alone: whether what he’s doing is right or wrong, and his behavior a good man’s or a bad one’s.” To not focus on that, and instead to focus on and cling to “this cacophony we live in,” ever worrying about having to eventually or suddenly leave it, is nothing short of blasphemy.
The second most often revisited stance on death that appears in Meditations is that death is a natural process. Marcus had not only worked out for himself why death happens (because the gods say it is for the best), but also what actually happens when we die—the physics of it. Again, it’s what Fiona Apples sings about in “I Want You To Love Me." According to Marcus, death is just the “dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed.” It is “something like birth, a natural mystery, elements that split and recombine.” In dying, we are simply restored to what produced us. “Reassigned as another portion of the world.” Back in the pulse.
This kind of reassigning, recombining, reabsorbing, realigning, is what Nature does. It is what Nature must do. “Nature’s job” is to transform things, “to pick them up and move them here and there.” And the things’ individual elements are not harmed or damaged by this “constant alteration,” so any transformation we undergo should be done “without grumbling.” All life forms are “fraying at the edges,” regardless of their age, all subject to “fragmentation and to rot.” In perhaps the most ruthless passage in Meditations, Marcus confronts himself with “the stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag. Look at it clearly. If you can.” Because you, too, are a “perishable thing,” to borrow Meister Eckhart’s phrase. Whenever I worry about my loved ones dying, or start to get uptight about my eventual end, I recall this phrase. Perishable things, all… Fragile, vulnerable things… “And yet you act,” Marcus wrote, “as if things were eternal—the way you fear and long for them…” To get overly attached is to welcome anxiety, and when we are anxious we cannot see things for what they really are, nor act effectively in the world.
In fixing our gaze unflinchingly on the organic nature of our existence, we not only protect ourselves from any delusions of immortality we might harbor, but also remind ourselves of life’s brevity. Another oft-recurring death-related theme in Meditations, the shortness of our time on this earth provides Marcus with yet more reason to live rightly. “Get what you can from the present,” he writes. “While you’re alive and able—be good.” Acknowledging the brevity of life also underscores its insignificance. Think of all the centuries that stretched out before your birth and that will continue unfurling after your death. Contemplate infinite time. Recognize the “half twist of a corkscrew" allotted to you. “Remember how brief is the attentiveness required,” Marcus writes. “And then our lives will end.”
I love this idea of the “attentiveness required.” Our attention is so incredibly precious; whatever we choose to give it to determines the quality of our life. What killed me so much about our societal response to COVID was that, even though we could see in ever starker contrast just how precarious our lives are, we continually chose to focus our attention on Donald. Freakin’. Trump. We worried we might not have a tomorrow, and yet we increased our social media use. We binged Netflix even more than usual. How brief was the attentiveness required! And we blew it.
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So far, I’ve talked about Marcus’s views on every death being determined by Fate, on death being a natural process, and on life being too brief to waste on fearing death. The fourth such theme that Meditations addresses has to do with what we lose when we die. Marcus writes, “The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.” In other words, when we die is of no importance. If a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it would be foolish—nay, cowardly—to wish for the latter, because either way, you’ll be losing the exact same present moment. “If you’ve seen the present,” Marcus says, “then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.” Therefore it should not matter whether you look at the world for sixteen years or sixty; the difference between tomorrow and years from tomorrow is negligible.
The comfort and thrill of this idea remind of something Jack Kerouac once wrote: “Eternity and the Here-and-Now are the exact same thing.” And also: “Life is finding your way through Nowhere.” If you look at that last word, you’ll see that it can be divided in two different ways— most obviously into “no” and “where”, but also into “now” and “here.” So according to Kerouac, life is finding your way through Now-Here, which is also Eternity. This moment—if you can (if you’re not driving), close your eyes, and focus on your breath for a moment—this moment, right here, is everything. It’s all that there is, and it’s all that there ever will be. Do you see? And even when you die, according to the Stoics, you will remain an expression of the same divine Consciousness. Just rearranged.
The fifth and final death-related theme that I found in reading Meditations has to do with remembering that so many others have died before us. If your ancestors did it, then why should’t you? People of all ages, professions, and cultures have died. Not to mention other animals. Entire species have died, for that matter. So why shouldn’t homo sapiens become extinct? Seems arrogant to think we’ll last forever.
Another piece of this theme of “joining the club,” if you will, of dead people, is the notion that we won’t be remembered long—if at all—after we die. And that it doesn’t matter. Marcus admonishes himself—and us, two thousand years later—to “consider the lives led once by others, long ago, the lives to be led by others after you, the lives led even now, in foreign lands. How many people don’t even know your name. How many will soon have forgotten it…To be remembered is worthless. Like fame. Like everything.”
The guy could get a bit nihilistic. There are moments in Meditations when he soothes his own fear of death by looking around and saying, “Really? You’re afraid of losing this? What’s so great about this?” It was the second century, after all. But even today with all our modern medicine and luxury, there are people—many people, I’m sure, if not most—who have moments where they can see only the drudgery and suffering in life. Yes, it’s a miracle to even be here. And also, it really sucks sometimes.
A related idea, at least in my mind, to the notion that everything is worthless, is that life itself does not really value us, so why should we value it? Horrible things happen all the time, to innocent people. If life is an arrangement, for instance, in which a perfectly healthy, perfectly kind man in the prime of life—in this case my dear friend Mike—can be driving a motorcycle down the road at 30 miles per hour one second, and the next second get run off the road and be paralyzed forever from the neck down, then that’s an arrangement we probably shouldn’t take too seriously. “It’s only life, after all,” to quote the Indigo Girls. “Nothing to get excited about,” to quote Marcus Aurelius.
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The death-related ideas presented in Meditations admittedly require a buying-in to certain spiritual perspectives, if they are to be helpful. They will only provide one with consolation or courage if one can believe, at least on some level, in God or Fate or some other Intelligence that’s guiding things; if one can see death as a natural and necessary process from which none of us can or should be exempt; if one can appreciate the brevity of life and how we are entitled to none of it, owed nothing; and if one can see the present moment as everything, and therefore as the only thing to lose. I can understand why some people would scoff at such concepts, but it seems to me we may as well espouse them. At some point, to borrow an idea from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, truth is what proves most functional.
If people believed in Fate, for instance, we might have wasted less energy on the thought that so much of what happened with COVID could have been avoided—referring to Trump’s lack of initial concern about the virus and his continual flouting of CDC recommendations. Well, a Stoic would say that none of that was supposed to be avoided. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Donald Trump, of all people, was President of the United States for the start of this particular pandemic. Is it so crazy to think that Nature needed lots of people to die, and that Trump, through his ineptitude, helped that process along? Those of us with more intelligence and less arrogance certainly could and still can continue to take all the recommended precautions regarding COVID, and at the same time we can practice accepting that this virus—or some other one—might still kill us, despite our efforts, if that is what Nature needs it to do. There are more absurd ways to die, after all, than by pandemic.
And if we could get on board with death as a necessary, even beneficial process or transformation, maybe we could see that so much of what we identify with in life is a story, an illusion of our own construction. To contemplate being unharmed by death is to recognize that we are not our egos; not our bodies; not our thoughts or emotions. We are both beyond and beneath all that, a simultaneously infinite and infinitesimal portion of an ever-expansive pulse, to which we always return in some form or another, never missing a beat.
And to see how short our time is here—to appreciate, as any pandemic urges us to do, how precious our attention—is synonymous with always embodying the inquiry, How can I make the most of this? How I can be most helpful? How can I best spend my time and energy here, so that if I die today, I’ll have no regrets?
And finally, if we could be present—truly present, not ruminating on the past or worrying about the future—we could perhaps see that this moment really is all there is, that, to quote Janis Joplin in a radio-friendly way, “It’s all the same freakin’ day, man.” The past is gone; the future an illusion; nothing is real but Right Now. This “brief instant” is all that we possess. And we get to decide what it’s made of, regardless of what’s happening around us and to us.
A Stoic perspective on death does not equate to a lack of concern about life. Quite the opposite. We debase life by fearing death to the extent that most of us fear it. To quote Anthony de Mello again, “You’re not living until it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to you whether you live or die.” In fearing death, we always and ultimately fear life.
