This book was probably never meant to be a book.
Marcus Aurelius was not writing it for readers.
He was not trying to produce a philosophical treatise or leave posterity an orderly system of Stoicism.
He was writing to himself.
In Greek, though he was a Roman emperor. Part of these notes was written during military campaigns. Two of the books even carry surviving references to places connected with his time on the Danube.
The Meditations served above all his own work on himself. They were meant to remind him of the principles he wanted to live by, especially when reality made them hard to apply.
That is why reading the Meditations sometimes gives you a strange feeling.
As though you had found someone's private notebook.
A man reminds himself not to be angry with other people.
He tries to talk himself into getting out of bed in the morning.
He returns to the thought that other people's opinion is not the most important thing.
He thinks about death.
About passing.
About work.
About the people who irritate him.
About his own judgements.
And again and again he tries to come back to one question:
How do I keep the right direction when I cannot control what happens around me?
What is actually inside the Meditations?
You will not find a single story there.
There is no beginning leading to a resolution at the end.
Apart from the first book, which is largely a record of gratitude towards the people he learned something from, the text has no structure that is easy to grasp.
The same problems return many times, as if the author had to keep reminding himself of things he already knew.
And perhaps that is what makes the Meditations so human.
Knowing is not yet living by what you know.
Inside, among other things, these keep returning:
People who act differently than we would like
How not to hand your own calm over to someone else's anger, ingratitude or selfishness.
What is within your power
How to come back to your own way of acting instead of spending energy on a world that cannot be made to comply.
Opinions and reputation
Why someone else's verdict can steer our life long after that person has stopped thinking about us.
Impermanence
How awareness of death can change the proportions of things that look enormous today.
Duty
What to do when you do not feel like doing what you consider right.
Community with others
Why Marcus Aurelius's Stoicism is not about cutting yourself off from people, but the opposite: about trying to act with the common good in mind.
Your own judgements
How much suffering appears not only through an event, but through what we immediately start telling ourselves about it in our heads.
These are not chapters of a textbook.
They are problems one man kept returning to for years.
In the morning, when you do not want to get up
One of the most surprisingly contemporary scenes in the Meditations begins very ordinarily.
Marcus Aurelius does not want to get out of bed.
He does not write a grand maxim about destiny.
He talks himself into the idea that a human being has something to do.
He looks at plants, birds, ants, spiders and bees. Each of them does its own part of the work.
So he tries to remind himself that his own task, too, is not merely to stay where it is pleasant.
It is easy to turn that thought into a slogan about productivity.
But then something important is lost.
The point is not to work without end.
Rest has its place as well.
The problem starts when pleasure becomes the only criterion of choice.
That question is still very much alive:
Am I doing something because I consider it right, or only when I feel like it?
Motivation comes and goes.
Mood changes.
So does energy.
If every important thing has to become pleasant first, we hand a very large part of life over to chance.
Today you will meet difficult people
Marcus Aurelius returns to being irritated by other people remarkably often.
This is not the philosophy of a man whom nothing annoys.
Quite the opposite.
It looks more like the philosophy of a man who knows how easily irritation arrives, and therefore has to keep reminding himself what he wants to do with his reaction.
That changes the way Stoicism reads.
Calm is not a trait you either have or do not.
It can be something you return to.
Marcus Aurelius tries to look at another person's behaviour through that person's beliefs.
If someone considers certain things good, bad, important or dangerous, their behaviour starts to make more sense.
That does not make it right.
But it stops being a completely incomprehensible attack on the world.
It is a subtle difference.
You can say:
"How can he do that?"
Or you can ask:
"What would he have to hold true or important for this behaviour to make sense to him?"
The first question leads quickly to outrage.
The second can open space between someone else's action and your reaction.
You do not have to approve.
You do not have to let your boundaries be crossed.
But you can try not to hand the other person control over who you become in response.
Do not become like the person who hurt you
In one of his short notes Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that the best answer to someone's wrongdoing is not to become like that person.
It is a very simple thought.
And in practice unusually hard.
Someone is aggressive.
We answer with aggression.
Someone manipulates.
We start manipulating more effectively.
Someone shows contempt.
We want to show them how little their opinion means to us.
We feel hurt and almost automatically begin to ask:
How can I make him feel this too?
At that moment the other person's behaviour starts defining ours.
The Stoic answer is uncomfortable.
It is possible that the other person did something wrong.
But now a separate question appears:
Who do you want to be in response?
You do not have full control over the first half of the situation.
You have far more influence over the second.
What actually happened, and what the mind added
One of the central Stoic practices concerns judgements.
In the Meditations Marcus Aurelius repeatedly tries to separate the first impression from what the mind adds to it afterwards.
Imagine a simple situation.
Someone does not answer a message.
The fact:
there is no reply.
And then the rest begins:
He does not care.
I did something wrong.
He is ignoring me.
He is angry.
He does not respect me.
He always does this.
I can never rely on him.
A few seconds, and one event turns into a whole story.
It may later turn out that part of that story was true.
Perhaps even all of it.
But at the moment it forms, we do not know that yet.
The mind turns possibility into certainty very quickly.
Stoic practice does not say:
"judge nothing".
Rather:
"notice the moment when the verdict joins what you actually know".
That place can be extraordinarily important.
Because between the event and the story you build about it there is sometimes a little freedom.
Other people's opinion lasts a shorter time than we think
Marcus Aurelius comes back to fame and reputation again and again.
Not because nobody judged him.
Precisely because he lived in a world where opinions about him could matter enormously.
And yet he reminds himself how quickly both the admired and those who admired them disappear.
This does not mean that other people's opinion is always unimportant.
Feedback can teach you something.
Reputation can affect a life.
Relationships require taking the other person into account.
The problem begins somewhere else.
When someone else's opinion becomes the place where you try to find out what you are worth.
Then you can start living in a very crowded room.
Full of people who are not physically there at all.
What will they think?
How does it look?
Did they notice?
Will they count it as a success?
Will they be envious?
Will anyone see that I am not coping?
Marcus Aurelius tries to remind himself that those whose judgement worries us so much are also passing.
Their verdicts are not an eternal tribunal.
Death as a way of restoring proportion
The Meditations speak about death very often.
Not in order to build a gloomy mood.
Marcus Aurelius uses impermanence as a way of cutting things back to their real size.
He reminds himself of the shortness of life, of the fading of memory about people, and of the fact that everyone lives only the moment that is happening now.
Think how many things can fill an entire day.
One unpleasant sentence.
A mistake at work.
Someone did not appreciate you.
A plan fell through.
You lost something.
Someone was right when you badly wanted them not to be.
In the middle of an event everything seems enormous.
The perspective of time can do something strange.
The question:
"Will this matter in ten years?"
does not solve every problem.
Some things really will matter.
But a great many of them suddenly regain their proper size.
The Stoic remembrance of death does not have to mean an obsession with it.
It can mean refusing to live as if every small failure had eternal weight.
Coming back to the present
Marcus Aurelius also reminds himself not to live through future difficulties in advance.
When the future arrives, he will have at his disposal the same reason he can use now.
This is not an encouragement to stop planning.
Planning happens now.
Fear very often happens in the future.
We imagine a conversation.
Then its outcome.
Then the consequences of that outcome.
Then the next reaction.
After a few minutes the body is responding to a series of events, none of which has happened yet.
Sometimes this prepares us to act.
Sometimes it only lets us suffer many times over the same possibility.
The Stoic answer is more modest:
What is actually there to do now?
Not in a month.
Not after it is all over.
Now.
Stoicism does not mean: "handle it alone"
The modern image of a Stoic turns easily into a solitary man who needs nothing, shows no emotion and solves every problem by himself.
The Meditations lead somewhere else.
For Marcus Aurelius a human being is a social creature.
Good action is bound up with the common good, with justice and with cooperation with others.
Self-discipline does not have to mean solitude.
Responsibility for yourself does not mean you can never lean on another person.
You can be responsible for your own action and at the same time say:
I cannot do this on my own.
The first book begins with other people
One of the most beautiful things in the Meditations appears before most of the best-known Stoic thoughts even start.
The first book is largely a record of what Marcus Aurelius received from others.
From family.
Teachers.
Friends.
People who showed him certain qualities by the way they lived.
That whole part reads more like a catalogue of things received from people than a manifesto of self-sufficiency.
It is a remarkable opening for a book associated today with inner strength.
Before there is:
how should I act,
there is:
from whom did I learn to be who I am?
Perhaps this is what a truer independence looks like.
Not as a conviction that we made ourselves.
Rather as the ability to recognise what we were given, and to decide deliberately what we want to carry forward.
This is not a Stoic's success diary
That is exactly what makes the Meditations so interesting.
Marcus Aurelius keeps reminding himself of the same things.
Not to be angry with people.
Not to chase opinion.
To remember impermanence.
To do what is his to do.
Not to let a first impression turn immediately into a verdict.
To act for the common good.
Which means that repetition is not a mistake.
It is part of the practice.
A person can understand something in the morning.
And be annoyed again in the afternoon.
He can know for years that other people's opinion does not define his worth.
And still be hurt by one remark from the right person.
You can know all the principles.
And still need to remind yourself of them.
Perhaps growth does not always look like:
"I no longer have that problem".
Sometimes it looks like:
"I notice earlier and earlier that I am walking into it again".
That is less spectacular.
But probably much closer to real life.
Why can the Meditations still move us?
Not because their author was an emperor.
Not because Stoicism became popular.
And not because every sentence of Marcus Aurelius is a timeless truth.
The Meditations stay interesting because they let us see a man trying to live in accordance with something he considers important.
And between the principle and the life a gap keeps appearing.
He knows he should not care about fame.
And yet he has to remind himself of it.
He knows he should treat people patiently.
And yet their behaviour irritates him.
He knows life is short.
And yet everyday matters can pull him in.
He knows he has duties.
And yet sometimes he does not want to get out of bed.
This is not the record of a man who reached calm and now teaches others.
It is rather the record of a man who keeps trying to return to it.
And that is exactly why we can recognise ourselves in him.
Where to start reading the Meditations
You do not have to treat them like a novel.
You can enter this text through whichever problem is close to you right now.
If difficult people are wearing you down, start with the passages on anger, on other people's faults and on community.
If you care a great deal about other people's opinion, look for the notes on fame, memory and impermanence.
If you feel you are trying to control too much, stop at judgements, at your own action and at accepting what has already happened.
If it is hard for you to begin, go back to the passage about getting out of bed and doing what belongs to a human being.
If everything seems too important, see how often Marcus Aurelius returns to time and to death.
If you feel alone with your burden, stop at his thinking about cooperation, community and accepting help.
You do not have to agree with everything.
You also do not have to try to become "a Stoic".
You can simply see whether one of these notes lands exactly where you could not put a name today.
One question to end with
Marcus Aurelius wrote down for himself the things he wanted to remember when life made remembering hard.
If you were to do the same today:
what one sentence would you want to leave yourself for a day when it is again difficult to live by what you already know?
Not for others.
Not as a quotation.
Not so that it sounds good.
For yourself.
Perhaps this is how a Meditation of your own begins.
Read the Meditations in QuietRoots
In QuietRoots you can start with a single passage of the Meditations, read the commentary, see where it sits in the whole work, and write down your own reflection.
You can come back to the text at different moments in your life and see why a sentence that once meant nothing to you suddenly matters later.
You do not have to ask:
"What does Stoicism say I should do?"
You can begin with a simpler question:
"What does this passage let me see in what I am living through right now?"