It's exhausting, isn't it? Getting this riled up. Then getting this down about it. Getting this worried. Getting this stressed. For what? For the relief of something bad not happening? Getting this excited, only to be subsequently disappointed.
'The passions,' as the Stoics called them, are dangerous. They burn us up…and burn us out. They pick us up, spin us around, chew us up, and spit us out, to paraphrase the Florence + the Machine song.
Is this what we're here for? To be the passions' slave? To be the plaything of emotions and impulses? It can't be!
We should instead try, as Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations (premium leather edition available here), "to be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it." Let others get picked up and put down a hundred times a day. Let the others get chewed up and spit out. Let us stand back a little, pausing and reflecting, persisting and resisting, refusing to let our emotions drag us out to sea.
That is our task.
Not to feel nothing…but to feel less pulled, less shaken, less owned by every passing wave. The passions will never cease, but we decide how much we let them toss us around.
P.S. Meditations is the definitive text on self-discipline, personal ethics, humility, self-actualization and strength. Despite it being written around 2,000 years ago, it remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written. Marcus's private and profound inner monologue is shockingly modern—and applicable to our lives even today.
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