“When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of
the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the
great Lebanese poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote in her
beautiful meditation on time, self, impermanence, and transcendence.
It is a sentiment of tremendous truth and simplicity, yet tremendously
difficult for the mind to metabolize — we remain material creatures,
spiritually sundered by the fact of our borrowed atoms, which we will
each return to the universe, to the stardust that made us, despite our
best earthly efforts. Physicist Alan Lightman contemplated this paradox
in his lyrical essay on our longing for permanence in a universe of constant change:
“It is one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we
long for immortality, indeed fervently believe that something must be
unchanging and permanent, when all of the evidence in nature argues
against us.”
Two millennia earlier, before the very notion of a universe even existed, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) provided uncommonly lucid consolation for this most disquieting paradox of existence in his Meditations ( | free ebook) — the timeless trove of ancient wisdom that gave us his advice on how to motivate yourself to get out of bed each morning, the mental trick for maintaining sanity, and the key to living fully.
Eons before the modern invention of self-help, the Stoics
equipped the human animal with a foundational toolkit for
self-refinement, articulating their recipes for mental discipline with
uncottoned candor that often borders on brutality — an instructional
style they share with the Zen masters, whose teachings are often given
in a stern tone that seems berating and downright angry but is animated
by absolute well-wishing for the spiritual growth of the pupil.
It is with this mindset that Marcus Aurelius takes up the
question of how to embrace our mortality and live with life-expanding
presence in Book II of his Meditations, translated here by Gregory Hays:
The speed with which all of them vanish — the objects in the world, and the memory of them in time. And the real nature of the things our senses experience, especially those that entice us with pleasure or frighten us with pain or are loudly trumpeted by pride. To understand those things — how stupid, contemptible, grimy, decaying, and dead they are — that’s what our intellectual powers are for. And to understand what those people really amount to, whose opinions and voices constitute fame. And what dying is — and that if you look at it in the abstract and break down your imaginary ideas of it by logical analysis, you realize that it’s nothing but a process of nature, which only children can be afraid of. (And not only a process of nature but a necessary one.)
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