Stoic Snippets 207

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 are the termination and cessation and change of your whole life a thing to be afraid of. 

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.21 

IMAGE: Titian, The Three Ages of Man (c. 1514)