12.3

Ruff Horizon etching plate

You are composed of three parts: body, breath, and mind. The first two merely belong to you in the sense that you are responsible for their care; the last alone is truly yours. If, then, you put away from this real self - from your understanding that is - everything that others do or say and everything that you yourself did or said in the past, together with every anxiety about the future, and everything that affects your body or its partner breath that is outside your own control, as well as everything that swirls about you in the eddy of outward circumstance, so that the powers of your mind, kept thus aloof and unspotted from all that destiny can do, may live their own life in independence, doing what is just, consenting to what befalls, and speaking what is true - if, I say, you put away from this master-faculty of yours every such clinging attachment, and whatever lies in the years ahead or the years behind, teaching yourself to become what Empedocles calls ‘a totally rounded orb, in its own rotundity joying’, and to be concerned solely with the life which you are now living, the life of the present moment, then until death somes you will be able to pass the rest of your days in freedom from all anxiety and in kindliness and good favour with the deity within you.

‘Meditations’ Marcus Aurelius (translation by Maxwell Staniforth)