1. Be good.
“No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good.”
Our task is to be good human beings. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
What does “good” mean? It means to be virtuous. To be kind, compassionate, loving, courageous, brave, disciplined, forgiving, hopeful, grateful, and so on.
“While you live, while you can, become good,” urges Marcus. “Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with Kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.”
2. Do the best you can
“If you are doing your proper duty let it not matter to you whether you are cold or warm, whether you are sleepy or well-slept, whether men speak badly or well of you, even whether you are on the point of death or doing something else: because even this, the act in which we die, is one of the acts of life, and so here too it suffices to ‘make the best move you can’.”
Being good doesn’t mean being perfect. It means doing the best we can under the given circumstances. That’s our job. Simple and straightforward.
3. Focus on yourself
“I do my own duty: the other things do not distract me.”
Again, Marcus keeps it simple. We are to focus on the things we do or fail to do. The rest? That’s none of our business.
4. Focus on what’s in front of you
“Concentrate only on the work of the moment, and the instrument you use for its doing.”
Whatever we are doing, we give our full and undivided attention to that task. We don’t multitask. We don’t think about anything else. We just do whatever we are doing to the best of our ability. That is enough.
Says Marcus: “Every hour of the day give vigorous attention, as a Roman and as a man, to the performance of the task in hand with precise analysis, with unaffected dignity, with human sympathy, with dispassionate justice – and to vacating your mind from all its other thoughts.”
5. Trust the Whole (Amor Fati)
“O world, I am in tune with every note of thy great harmony. For me nothing is early, nothing late, if it be timely for thee. O Nature, all that thy seasons yield is fruit for me.”
“So where should a man direct his endeavor,” asks Marcus. “Here only – a right mind, action for the common good, speech incapable of lies, a disposition to welcome all that happens as a necessary, intelligible, flowing from an equally intelligible spring of origin.”
You may be familiar with the idea of Amor Fati, a term coined by 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “My formula for what is great in mankind is Amor Fati: not to wish for anything other than that which is; whether behind, ahead, or for all eternity. Not just to put up with the inevitable – much less to hide it from oneself, for all idealism is lying to oneself in the face of the necessary – but to love it.”
The Stoics call it the art of acquiescence – to accept and love whatever is happening. A maxim they lived by: “If this is the will of nature, then so be it.”
We can never know what impact an event will have on our future. If we let the event make us miserable, that’s due to our own interpretation and our own mistrust. Events are neutral. “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them,” said Epictetus. “Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant,” said Seneca.
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