Super cheat day. Writing Aurelius’ quote for my 3rd day.
”In the first place: nothing at random, and nothing unrelated to some goal or end. Second, don’t relate your actions to anything except an end or goal which serves the human community.” (Book XII, 20)
He’s pretty much saying, any action should be driven towards your own end goal. It’s up to you.
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.
For the past 100+ days, when I come to write a post, I sit and ponder what the title should be. This made sense when I was writing about my Southeast Asia trips since I knew exactly what I was going to write about: a specific day from two years ago.
Since then, I’ve struggled to write anything substantive. I randomly write down a thought hoping it’ll become something interesting. I’m trying something new today, where I’m ” not adding a title, and just writing. In the end, it could come to something?
Maybe something better would be to write about what I want to do, or have accomplished, or have moved the needle on. Something that popped to mind is to write about a quote or idea from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I’ve been wanting to start my mornings by reading and digesting from a passage of Meditations. I suppose I could do this by first actually reading Meditations. Or by first trying to read in the morning. I gave up that practice a few weeks ago. I couldn’t keep up that habit. Come to think of it, I’ve broken every habit I’ve been attempting to make since the beginning of the year. The only habit I’ve continued to “do” is to write this blog. I put that in quotations because there have been several days or even weeks where my posts were single sentences written just to say i’ve written something for the day. Pretty weaksauce in my opinion. A reader would feel the same in my humble opinion.
I don’t have Meditations on me since I’m in Utah. And the reason why this actually popped to mind is because I got Darius Fox’s email for the day. He talks about Marcus Aurelius and the three rules that he lives by. You can read it here. I’m taking a page from his book by writing about Aurelius. And I’m going to directly take from his page the first rule that Aurelius speaks of.
“Suppress the value-judgment, and the ‘I’ve been hurt’ is also suppressed. Suppress the ‘I’ve been hurt,’ and the harm is suppressed.” (Book IV, 7)
We all make judgements, whether we want to or not. What I take from this quote is that it’s up to us to react to the value-judgement that comes from the event. It seems to follow the latin phrase “amor fati”- we make the best out of our situation. Maybe the event was I got cut off by a LA driver. I can add value-judgement to that event by thinking it made me angry. But really, that does no good. What can I do with that thought? It’ll just drive me to be more angry, or even worse, maybe I retaliate and cut him off. Or cut someone else off because I’m upset. That judgement has taken control of me. Instead, I could suppress the value-judgement and just let it be “pure” as Darius Foroux says. It happened, and I’ll shrug it off. Amor Fati, my friend.
OutsideTheWell 