Marcus Aurelius on what is in my control
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
This note collects passages I marked between May and August, all on one theme. 🏛️ Marcus Aurelius never states the division of things into what is ours and what is not as a doctrine. That is Epictetus, whom he read. He applies it, over and over, to whatever went wrong that day.
Three moves recur. First, the trouble is in the judgement. If something outside distresses you, he says, what hurts is your estimate of it, and you can withdraw that. Take away the opinion that you were harmed and the harm goes with it. Second, the inner retreat. People want houses in the country or by the sea. He says the quietest place is always available: go into your own mind, briefly, and come back. Third, and the one I use most, the obstacle converted. Other people can block an action, but they cannot block the intention or the disposition behind it, because the mind adapts and turns the hindrance into material. What stood in the way of the act becomes the next act.
Read together they describe a narrow territory, my judgement and my response, and a very large one that is none of my business.
✨KEY IDEAS
If something external pains you, the pain comes from your judgement of it, and that can be revoked now.
Remove the thought that you have been wronged and the sense of injury goes too.
The mind turns whatever blocks its activity into a means of continuing it.
Nowhere is quieter than your own mind, so retreat there often and briefly.
People exist for one another: teach them, or bear with them.
📝READING NOTES
Long's translation is in the public domain, but I have paraphrased everything here: these are passages gathered over a summer and I did not check each one word for word.
Three times this year
The passages were marked for reasons.
- The launch. At 23:40 on 11 March duplicates began appearing, and at 02:40 we rolled auto-triage back. What was mine: the call, and how I spoke to people at that hour. What was not: the bug, already written.
- The finger. A pulley strain on 15 March. Six weeks without crimping, months of slabs. Mine: turning up, the loading pin, my feet.
- The reorganisation. Announced 29 April. Dov gone by the end of June. Nothing in it was mine except how I ran the merged team's first quarter.
Each fits the sentence 💎 I can listen to a system but I cannot control it, which I had first from 📖 Meadows on dancing with systems. Marcus supplies the personal half: what to do with yourself while the system does what it does.
The obstacle
💎 The obstacle in front of the work is part of the work comes from book 5. The finger is my example. I could not pull on small holds, so I climbed slabs, and slabs are footwork, and my footwork had been the weak part for three years. The obstacle did not get out of the way. It was the training. The axiom is ⚓ The obstacle is part of the work.
My caveats, which I want on the record
- The line is not as clean as he draws it. Between mine and not mine there is a wide band of things I can influence without controlling: a colleague's decision, a customer's renewal, whether I am put forward. Stoicism read lazily files all of that under not mine, and that is how you end up never asking for anything.
- Some pain is not a judgement. A strained tendon hurts whatever opinion I hold.
- He was an emperor. Rather more was in his control than in most people's, and he still wrote this every night. I find that reassuring and also a little funny.
So the axiom I wrote today, ⚓ Sort what is mine from what is not, has a third pile: mine to try.
Two days after not this cycle. The decision was not mine. The case was, and the asking was. The third pile held.
Reading record
- Passages: Books 4.3, 4.7, 5.20, 8.47, 8.59
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : Meditations, books 4, 5 and 8, Long's translation
- Marcus Aurelius argues that : only my judgements and responses are mine, and that disturbance and obstruction can both be handled from there
- by stating that : distress comes from an opinion that can be withdrawn, the mind has its own retreat, and anything that blocks an action can be taken up as the material for the next one