Don't turn your back on yourself

Giving into hating others is a self-betrayal. Period.

We’re being pulled apart. Forces beyond our control and baked into the daily fabric of our lives are actively conspiring to make sure we have less in common. What has happened in the last year alone that made you question whether you can live in harmony with your neighbor?

It is all but guaranteed that this week there will be another outrage. Anticipate a celebrity whose work you enjoy will articulate a view you hold in contempt. Anticipate there will be another court ruling that upsets your view of justice. Brace yourself for a friend you’ve known & loved for years voting against your interests. These things are always around the next corner. Let’s stop being surprised by them and instead adjust our mindset.

Marcus Aurelius did not take much pleasure in being the ruler of imperial Rome. He resented and tried to avoid for many years his trajectory towards “the purple,” or being the head of state (the emperor donned purple garments).

In order to soothe his own mind and not hate every day of his life, he is known to have embraced this view of his subjects & colleagues within Rome….and I have to say, it is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever consumed.

When you take up in the morning, tell yourself. The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they cannot tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and I have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes. Like the two rows of teeth both upper and lower. To obstruct one another is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

-Marcus Aurelius, Mediations (Book 2) 121 - 180 AD

You can only truly hate other people if A) you’ve stopped seeing them as people or B) if you truly view yourself as wholly righteous and unstained by imperfection.

Whether A or B….is a person who engages with the world in this way the kind of person you want to spend time around? Do people who think like this make for good friends?

Choose to go the other way. Expect shortcomings, anticipate error and forgive without malice because in the end, this approach is self-serving.

You’ll need the same treatment in exchange, one day…probably momentarily if you fuck up as often I do. Because remember, “the "wrongdoers have nature related to your own.”

Don’t turn your back on them. You’d be turning your back on yourself.

Have a great rest of the weekend.

This is the way.