Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.29

Wipe out the imagination. Stop the pulling of the strings. Confine yourself to the present.

Understand well what happens either to you or to another. Divide and distribute every object into the formal and the material.

Think of your last hour. Let the wrong that is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7 (tr Long)

For me, the suggestions in this passage have always been tied together by an urgent need for clarity of purpose. I should remove the extraneous, all the diversions and obstacles within my thinking, so that the simple yet profound meaning of living can be revealed.

I am always being bombarded with images, with appearances of what seems pleasant or unpleasant, desirable or frightening. I must not let these impressions rule me. I must learn to rule them.

I can do nothing about what has happened in the past, because it no longer exists, or about what will happen in the future, because it does not yet exist. The only power that is firmly mine is ruling my own thoughts and actions in the present.

Circumstances and events may seem entangled and confused, their meaning and value unclear to me. All I must do is to focus only upon what something is within itself, not upon what is added by my own worry or imaginings.

For me to know something is not to merely have a vague sense of how it may feel. I must apprehend the identity that makes it, and the parts out of which it is made. I can never really face, or find benefit from, something I do not understand.

If I can only think of this very moment as if it were my last, not as an exercise in morbidity but as a test of my character, I can also remain dedicated to living well simply for its own sake, without adding any conditions or further expectations.

Whenever I am confronted with what is wrong within another, I do not need to let it enter into me. It can remain exactly where it started, and I can use it to transform myself into something right. “The buck stops here.”

Life only becomes as hard, or as perplexing, or as discouraging as I allow it to become. The tools necessary for living well are already present within me. Judgment, choice, and action committed to living according to Nature, and nothing beyond that, are all that is needed, and the less attention I pay to distractions, the richer my life will be.

I don’t need to let myself be pulled by strings.

Written in 11/2007