Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.14

All things are the same, familiar in experience, and ephemeral in time, and worthless in the matter.

Everything now is just as it was in the time of those whom we have buried.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9.14 (tr Long)

They say that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and I will sometimes find myself frustrated with an expression like that. Well, which is it? The pedantry of the academic will say very much about very little, and the platitudes of the New Age guru will say very little about very much, but I feel I am no closer to understanding whether everything is constant, or everything is variable.

If everything comes and goes, is born and then dies, how is everything also lasting?

I only get frustrated when I don’t want to clearly distinguish, when I make it more complex or simpler than it has to be.

As is so often the case, an analogy can help me. The players will change, but it is still the same play. There will be different actors behind the mask, but they are all, in their own ways, performing the very same roles.

The particulars change. We are all different individuals, in different places, facing different situations. Each one passes on into another.

The universal remains unchanging. All things express the same substance, in the same Universe, and repeat the same patterns. All are only aspects of the one and the same.

My wife will make a new pot of Hungarian goulash, which will be consumed very quickly, but it follows the very same recipe made by my great-grandmother, and probably even long before that. This is how things are both ephemeral and familiar.

So Heraclitus was in a sense right, that you can’t step in the same river twice, and Parmenides was also in a sense right, that being is one, change only an illusion. It all depends on whether we are looking at it from the bottom up, or from the top down, at the parts or at the whole.

In daily practice, when I feel overwhelmed by how quickly everything seems different, I can remember that down beneath it all, it is still the same as it ever was. Even as the sun rises and sets, there is nothing new under it; in an ever-unfolding Universe, every variation or combination has already been, and it will be again.

When I am tossed about, let me find strength and comfort in what is constant and one, while letting go of what is passing and many.

Written in 8/2008