It does so much damage. It sets us back so much. It’s something we desperately don’t want to happen.
So yeah, we think about it a lot. We fret about it a lot. We dread it a lot.
It’s worth remembering, as we said recently about toxic people, that these things aren’t thinking about you at all. Just as a Nero was not thinking about Seneca, the economy is not thinking about you. This drought is not scheming to disrupt your plans. The airport isn’t trying to make you miss your flight and thus your meeting and therefore screw up your career. The highway doesn’t care. Neither does gravity or cancer.
These are impersonal forces. These are inanimate objects. This is fortune and fate. It’s not targeting you. It’s not favoring or picking on you. We have to figure out how to deal with them…without turning our minds over to them. We can’t let them steal our focus or our happiness. We can’t let them consume our every waking second. And most importantly, as Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations (our favorite translation here), we can’t let these inhuman forces steal our humanity.
These things are indifferent to you. Your goal is to be a little more indifferent to them.
P.S. Dealing with these “inhuman forces” and learning to be more indifferent to them requires the right lessons and the right tools.
Meditations can give you those tools. You can hold in your hands—and learn from—the journal of the most powerful man of his time. Marcus’s private thoughts, admonitions, and reminders to himself. His prescriptions for courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. The ways he dealt with rulership, difficult people, wars, plagues, anxiety, choosing how to spend his time—even getting out of bed in the morning.
For all the times you will return to this remarkable book, to find solace in it, to find answers for your own struggles, to learn how to better deal with life’s challenges, we’ve created a beautiful leatherbound edition of our favorite translation. It’s meant to withstand repeated daily use, be a treasured reference, and, like the lessons inside, endure.
Get the leatherbound edition of Meditations for yourself or gift it to a loved one.
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