Power over your mind

Why it stays with me

This is a popular modern paraphrase rather than an exact line from the Meditations, but it captures one of its central ideas faithfully. Marcus returns again and again to the difference between what happens to us and how we respond to it.

What strikes me is who wrote it. He was a Roman emperor, someone with more outside power than almost anyone alive, and he still concluded that the only thing truly his was his own judgement.

I don’t read it as advice to stop caring about the world. I read it as a way of spending effort well: worry less about what can’t be changed, and put that energy into how I think and act.