Unwanted change
When things have changed
Something has shifted that you did not choose. A move, a new manager, a place closing, an arrangement that held for years and does not now. You keep measuring the present against how it was, and the present keeps losing.
Marcus was moved about the empire for most of his life and wrote a good deal of Meditations far from home. What he says about change is less about accepting it than about where to stand while it happens.
Marcus Aurelius
The art of life is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s, in respect of this, that it should stand ready and firm to meet onsets which are sudden and unexpected.
Life is more like wrestling than dancing, because it has to stand ready for what arrives without warning. A dancer has the music in advance. The wrestler does not, and is not surprised by that. It is a different thing to be braced for than to be fond of.
Marcus Aurelius
Take me and cast me where thou wilt; for there I shall keep my divine part tranquil, that is, content, if it can feel and act conformably to its proper constitution. Is this change of place sufficient reason why my soul should be unhappy and worse than it was, depressed, expanded, shrinking, affrighted? And what wilt thou find which is sufficient reason for this?
Put me down anywhere, he says, and what matters in me will be the same there. Then the question he actually asks himself: is a change of place a sufficient reason for the mind to be worse than it was? He cannot find one, and he looks.
Marcus Aurelius
Everywhere and at all times it is in thy power piously to acquiesce in thy present condition, and to behave justly to those who are about thee, and to exert thy skill upon thy present thoughts, that nothing shall steal into them without being well examined.
The three things that survive any change, because they were never in the circumstances. To accept what is here, to act justly towards the people who are here, and to examine your own thoughts before they settle. Everything else can move.
One question
Of what you had before, what was actually yours, and what was only where you were standing?
Meditations is quoted from George Long's translation of 1862, which is in the public domain. The passages are chosen by hand, shown as written, and never paraphrased.