Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.59

In everything that happens keep before your eyes those to whom the same things happened, and how they were vexed, and treated them as strange things, and found fault with them.

And now where are they? Nowhere. Why then do you too choose to act in the same way? And why do you not leave these agitations that are foreign to Nature, to those who cause them and those who are moved by them?

And why are you not altogether intent upon the right way of making use of the things that happen to you? For then you will use them well, and they will be a material for you to work on. Only attend to yourself, and resolve to be a good man in every act that you do.

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

If I choose to be dissatisfied with my circumstances, I will end up filling myself with frustration and anxiety. I may then lash out at others, or I may turn upon myself, but in either case I have failed to make anything better, and I have only made myself worse.

This may seem so obvious when I observe it in someone else, and I may wonder how anyone could be so foolish. Now let me apply the insight to myself, where I am so caught up in my own passions, and where an impartial judgment is not quite as easy. If I look carefully, I will see that I often do exactly the same things I shake my head at in others.

I may express myself with anger, sadness, desperation, or vengeance. I may become obsessed with one thing, and neglectful of anything else. I will frantically assume that if I somehow “fix” the problems around me, then my life will be right back on track. After all, if things aren’t the way I want them to be, I assume I should just push back harder, scream louder, complain with more spite, or stomp my foot with more indignation. But what it all shares in common is the misguided belief that my happiness follows from the world going my way.

I had a temper tantrum as a child because I couldn’t watch a certain show on TV, I injured my foot by repeatedly kicking a boulder when a girl told me I wasn’t worth her time, and I drank myself stupid when other people didn’t listen. I might as well have held my breath until God Himself finally gave in and handed me whatever I wanted.

One thing that always troubled me when I was younger was the way people were so quick to insult and demean one another. They seemed shocked when there was lying, cheating, murder, and mayhem in the world, but at the same time they would gladly put down the people around them, sometimes in the most vicious and heartless of ways. It seemed so unnecessary.

But then I noticed I would sometimes do exactly the same thing, and I looked at my own motives. I would speak and act poorly toward others when I wasn’t happy with my situation, and so I would turn the force of my own misery outwards at them. Could it be that they were doing much the same? Here I had thought they would diminish me because they felt superior to me, when perhaps they were diminishing me because they felt so diminished themselves.

At the root of it all is how I will decide to find my happiness, whether within myself or from the things around me, and in turn what I will decide needs fixing and changing, myself or the things around me. If I look to my own thoughts and actions, I must simply adjust my thoughts and actions when life seems to be going wrong. But if I look to making the world fit my desires, I will only find myself disturbed and enraged.

The grasping man always finds something he doesn’t like, and so he fights it. The contented man always finds something good in everything, and so he works with it. He recognizes that a frustration is an opportunity, and an obstacle is a tool for self-improvement.

I shouldn’t get angry when the world doesn’t seem right, but I should make myself right instead. It’s like the difference between slamming myself into a brick wall or sitting down for a rest under its shade.

Written in 1/2008