Listening to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is making me a better Christian. Okay, not quite, but a better driver. Not that either. I am, however, becoming a calmer driver. I'm giving others a little more leeway, yelling at them a little less. I admit, I'm not a very good stoic. In particular I find the stoic body/mind binary untenable, and the concept of nature as fate . . . well, I can't buy it. I have, however, been trying to take Marcus Aurelius advice about how to deal with people who otherwise would bug me:
"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body,
the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things
happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But
I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the
bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin
to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in
the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither
be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can
I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation,
like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower
teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is
acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away."
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