Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.2

How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression that is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 5 (tr Long)

I often become stubborn when someone tells me that something important is really quite easy, especially when I have found the exact same thing to be extremely difficult in my own efforts. Dwelling upon anger will never lead to good things.

“Perhaps it is easy for you, since you are so much better. But for the rest of us peasants, it’s no walk in the park!”

As always, it is my own ignorance that is getting in the way, my unwillingness to think the problem through clearly. It doesn’t matter at all, for my purposes, what motive someone else may have had in mind when he told it was easy. He may indeed have been bragging about himself, or as I suspect is the case for Marcus Aurelius, he may well have been trying to be helpful.

Troublesome impressions, whether they are immediate feelings, haunting memories of the past, or worries about the future, are, in and of themselves, completely powerless over my ability to judge them. They are simply something given, feelings made present to my awareness. They only achieve any power when I offer them value in my estimations, and when I allow them to influence my sense of true and false, good and bad. Then they affect my actions.

A child may fear the impression of a monster under the bed, a young man may fear the impression of being unloved, and an old man may fear the impression of failure. If he only chooses to remove these objects from his attention, because he fully understands that none of them are important for his living, they will no longer trouble him.

I am not troubled, for example, by the impression of seeing people wearing bright colors or muted colors, or of being tall or short, since those qualities have nothing to do with their merits. They do not enter into my thinking as being relevant. It is therefore easy to disregard them.

Now why does it still seem so difficult to remove other sorts of impressions? The recollection of that betrayal? Being bullied by important folks? The temptation of a fifth of bourbon when I feel hopeless?

It isn’t removing the impression that’s the problem at all, as I can always look the other way. No, the difficulty is in still wanting to pay attention. I should never blame the feeling, but I should take responsibility for what I do with it. I still desire it, from previous habit, because I haven’t yet chosen to not desire it. Once the commitment is made, wiping away the impression is indeed easy, but before the commitment is made, wiping away the impression is nigh impossible. I still want it to be there, after all!

The feeling isn’t the obstacle. My thinking is the obstacle. And who really controls that? I’ve usually been attacking it from the wrong end.

Written in 3/2006