Seven Key Points From Marcus Aurelius’ First Morning Meditation

you’re going to meet up with lots of jerks, but here’s how you can avoid getting angry with them

Perhaps one of the best known passages from Marcus Aurelius’ book, the Meditations is the daily reminder he sets himself. It is the very first chapter of book 2, and reads like this:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

This is from Gregory Hayes’ 2003 translation, which is pretty decent as far as translations go. You can find plenty of other English translations of this passage. I can’t say that I’ve run across…