Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.21

Termination of activity, cessation from movement and opinion, and in a sense their death, is no evil.

Turn your thoughts now to the consideration of your life, your life as a child, as a youth, your manhood, your old age, for in these also every change was a death.

Is this anything to fear? Turn your thoughts now to your life under your grandfather, then to your life under your mother, then to your life under your father; and as you find many other differences and changes and terminations, ask yourself, is this anything to fear?

In like manner, then, neither is the termination and cessation and change of your whole life a thing to be afraid of.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9.21 (tr Long)

People have all sorts of ways of showing you that that they no longer care. I have found that simply ignoring a person is the most common, the easiest solution for dealing with someone who is now undesirable or inconvenient; we think that if we look away, it must never have happened.

But the most interesting brush-off I ever received came from someone I thought would never let me down. She fixed her eyes on me quite seriously, and carefully described how she had seen an old man on the subway the previous day.

“He looked just like I know you’ll be one of these days.” Her expression was one of complete horror and disgust.

I didn’t know it at the time, but in hindsight I understood that this was her odd way of telling me that I was no longer interesting to her. The thought of an old version of me, perhaps sick, weak, or broken, was deeply unattractive.

As much as we might vehemently deny it, aging troubles us to the core. Perhaps we cringe at it in others because we know with such certainty that it will come to us as well. So we worship youth, thinking it expresses everything about vitality, and we turn away from old age, shunning it at as a sign of failure.

What we are forgetting is that every passing moment, at any time, is already an ending, a little death. The very fact that this sounds disturbing reveals our deeply rooted fear of transition. If it isn’t permanent, it must be no good. But every act of living is also an act of dying, of changing from one state into another.

The fact that nothing remains constant isn’t just a part of the process, it is the very definition of a process, a continual unfolding of action. This is as true of every part of Nature as it is of the whole of Nature, and it is as true at the beginning of our lives, or in the middle, as it is at the end, in that each and every change is itself a beginning, middle, and an end.

Why will we fear our deathbeds, but not a graduation from school, or a wedding, or the birth of a child? They are really no different at all. Why smile at one passage but cry at another?

Youth and growth are hardly evils, and neither are death and aging. They are necessary aspects of living. We can hardly love one of these and not the other. 

Written in 10/2008