Among the truths you will do well to contemplate most frequently are these two: first, that things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within; and secondly, that all visible objects change in a moment, and will be no more. Think of the countless changes in which you yourself have had a part. The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Four
Not surprisingly, this is one of the most famous passages from the Meditations, and not simply because he is jumping the gun on Hamlet ("There's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.") by over a thousand years. I've been thinking a lot about this passage lately as I struggle through a mountain of self doubts (revisiting Shakespeare, "When sorrows come they come not single spies, but in battalions."). In the end are these merely internal fancies? I suppose I'm more responsible for being alone (as my friends would agree, I'm undateable) than my polyneuropathy, but in the end I'm equally responsible for how I react to both. Truthfully, I haven't reacted well to anything over the last year, highlighted by too much anger and too much self-pitying. As MA reminds us, all we possess it this one moment, and I've thrown too many of them away lately.
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