It might not seem that way. It might, in fact, seem like everything is falling apart.
You didn’t get the promotion you wanted. The election turned out differently than you’d hoped. You just got some disappointing news. You just got hurt. You just got screwed over. Meanwhile, that person you can’t stand is getting ahead, getting lucky break after lucky break.
This isn’t the timeline I’m supposed to be on, you think. This isn’t how it was supposed to go.
But what if it is?
"That every event is the right one," Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations (this is the leatherbound copy I travel with). "Look closely and you'll see. Not just the right one overall, but right. As if someone had weighed it out with scales.”
It wasn’t just mental jujitsu for him though; he believed we had to make this the right timeline—in how we acted. We had to look for the good, he said, but most importantly, “embody it in your actions: goodness—what defines a good person. Keep to it in everything you do."
It might not feel right. It might not seem fair.
But it’s still ours to shape. It’s our job to make it right.
In a way, that’s what Meditations is—it’s Marcus Aurelius trying to remind himself that for all that’s going wrong in his life, all that’s going sideways, all that he’s dealing with, he is on the right timeline. And as he says in Meditations, this isn’t unfortunate that it happened to me, it’s fortunate that it happened to me—how can I use it for fuel? The book is both the reminder of that and the means by which he is doing it.
Whether it’s your first time readingMeditationsor your fiftieth, I think you’re going to get a lot out of the digital guide and this group discussion we’re doing together. I get something out of it each year that we do it, and I’d love to see you in there.
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