🏛️Meditations

You govern your judgments and your actions and nothing else. Most of what hurts is not the event but the opinion added to it, so the daily work is to look at the thing plainly, do what the moment asks of a reasonable and social creature, and remember how brief and small the whole business is.

The working rule I took from it is ⚓ The obstacle is part of the work.

• Not read so much as kept open. A few paragraphs most mornings since New Year's Day, after the walk and before the 300 words.
• George Long's 1862 translation, thees and thous included. I tried a modern one in a shop and missed the stiffness.
• He is not writing to me. 💡 Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek, for himself, and the title is not his.
• He repeats himself, complains about getting up, and tells himself off. That is what a notebook is for. See 🏛️ Marcus Aurelius.
• The progress bar shows where the bookmark is on this pass, in Book 8. It will never say finished, because it is not that kind of book.
• Two paragraphs a morning is the 🧩 Minimum viable habit version of reading philosophy, and the only version I have ever kept up.