Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.8

Take away your opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, "I have been harmed."

Take away the complaint, "I have been harmed," and the harm is taken away.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4 (tr Long)

This is another one of those classic Stoic passages, and for very good reason. The insight strikes to the very heart of what I like to call the Stoic Turn, and it does so with clarity and simplicity. It helps me to recognize how it is necessary for me to shift the weight I had assumed was in the power of things, to the power of my own thinking about those things.

This has become for me not just a question of theoretical reflection, but something I have slowly but surely been learning to do in daily practice. I am continually amazed at the influence my estimation has on my impressions, such that after I have mentally stripped away the context of my own assumptions, I am left with only the bare bones of something external acting upon my awareness. How little actually proceeds from what is outside of me, and how much is imposed by what is inside of me.

I am faced with an impression, and I must immediately take care. The impression will contain within it certain qualities, but I must not confuse them with the qualities of my own thoughts. As soon as I say that something is frightening or appealing, disturbing or desirable, I am already making judgments about what it becomes for me.

To help me with my own discipline, I think of a dog, and then I think of whether he is a “good dog” or a “bad dog”.

Now I can certainly say that simply by being a dog, by existing and by sharing in a certain nature and purpose, the dog is in himself already good. But what I usually mean by calling him good or bad is actually whether I myself approve or disapprove of what he has done, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, convenient or inconvenient to me.

I can laugh at myself when I remember that a dog must do his business, and that this is good for him. But just because I was too lazy to let him out, and he has now done his business on my carpet, does not make him bad at all. The bad is entirely in how I see it.

Now I do not wish to make light of the seriousness of our human experience, but even the things that move and affect us the most deeply are different not in kind, but only in degree.

When I say, “she broke my heart,” I must be careful to distinguish between what she may have done, and what I did with what she may have done. These are not the same thing.

Again, it may only be an image that helps me remember the deeper concept, but I often think of an early scene from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia:

Potter: [trying to copy Lawrence's snuffing a match with his fingers] Oooh! It damn well hurts!

Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.

Potter: Well, what's the trick, then?

Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

Written in 6/2005