To continue on with Aurelius thoughts, the one today is related to things you can control. I have a post-it to remind me to focus on things that I can control. Aurelius goes one step further to say to only desire what you can control.

This makes more sense to me as life goes on. I used to, or still, crave money. I want to be rich. But the more I pursued it, the more I hated my life and what I’ve become. Now, I want to only really focus on what I can control, which is at the moment, what kind of work I want to do, what kind of person I want to become starting now.

Most things are out of our control. A friend of mine even thinks at an extreme that maybe there is no such thing as free will anymore. I can see his point of view now. Even our own thoughts and actions may have been driven from years of social constructs or our guardians or the drive for money. And those are all driven by others, who were subconsciously driven by other actions around them. I could fall into a total rabbit hole thinking about this driving myself nuts. But I will not, because if there’s one thing I can control, it’s my thoughts right now, this second.

I’m not saying I can control my thoughts. If anything, I can’t control it at all. It bounces from one thought to another, from one place to another, whether I like it or not. Even writing this short piece, I’ve already checked my email twice, and looked up 100 times as people, or some random piece of object, float by.

It’s something i need to work on. Not only that, but I need to focus and understand and love whatever happens to me. Which floats back to my current favorite saying, amor fati. Amor fati, my friends.