Viernes

 

And here we find ourselves on a Friday after another stressful week.  All too soon, Monday will come and we will start again.  At the end of days like these, I need a wisdom transfusion from Marcus Aurelius.

How do we make the ethical choice?  How do we make a just society?  What do we do in the face of suffering and loss?  And what about that eventual finality when we shuffle off this mortal coil?  The answers to these questions inspire our actions and behaviors.  The answers are not just lofty platitudes, but ways to live and be all the days we are granted.  Only the summation of life determines how we will be remembered.

I love the Stoics.  They believe life is best navigated with logic and rational thought; emotions only cloud our vision and manipulate our hearts.  They believe in logos, reason, the principles that power the universe.

Stoics broke the world down into three disciplines.  First, perception must be pure with absolute objectivity in all dilemmas.  We must learn to see things as they are.  The second discipline of action means in all dealings, we must be true to reason and purpose while rising above animalistic impulses.  We act for valid, moral, ethical purposes.  Third, will, covers those things we experience, those events that fall outside our control.  As Gregory Hays writes in his introduction to Meditations (Modern Library, 2002) by Marcus Aurelius, “Acts of nature such as fire, illness, or death can harm us only if we choose to see them as harmful.”  This is a difficult concept when one has lost everything in a raging fire or experienced the death of a loved one due to COVID-19, but it is the way to keep moving forward.  We must continue to live because that is all we can do.

Marcus Aurelius tells us the path is clear:  “Objective judgment…Unselfish action…willing acceptance…of all external events.”

I find his words particularly stinging and direct.  “You are an old man.  Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future,” he shouts at us.  Wisdom allegedly comes with age.  Instead, we act like children throwing a tantrum when life does not give us what we want.  It is time to grow up and act our age.

We are warned.  “…There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself, it will be gone and will never return.”  So, we must focus every moment and do every action with precise, genuine seriousness, “tenderly, willingly, with justice.”  We must free ourselves from distractions.  He tells us to “do everything as if it were the last thing you [are] doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.”

Of course, there will be days where we are frustrated, overburdened, anxious.  Marcus Aurelius says that “The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of pain and inner convulsion…The angry man is more like a victim of wrongdoing, provoked by pain to anger.”  Are we in psychic and physical pain every day?  Does it make us short-tempered, agitated, too blunt and harsh with our words?  It helps to step back, take a deep breath, pause before speaking.  The consequences of a quick retort can last a lifetime.  Speaking less and listening more will awaken us to the path we share with our fellow human beings.  No one here gets out alive, as we are often reminded.  We share the same boat upon an ocean, and we have much in common.  “But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike,” Marcus Aurelius writes, “and they are neither noble nor shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.”

In the end, we must remember this is our only life.  We are guaranteed no other.  Therefore, it is up to us to push on and be in the world.  We do not possess the past, nor can we change it.  We do not own the future, but we can poison its land before we arrive through negative actions and poor emotional choices.  We have the present, the only moment we can influence and live in, so therefore, we must make the most of it.

These are words of comfort after a long week.  Now, we must rest and embrace this moment to love and be loved.  The gift of a good life is peace of heart and mind.  Marcus Aurelius reminds us how to live.  I dip into his words from time to time to remind myself that there is another way to exist.