Marcus Aurelius

I just posted this recently.

"The impediment to action advances action," Marcus Aurelius.

True in drama for sure, but what about creativity? I'd say this also works for creative thinking.

Obstacles and impediments often generate the most creative solutions.

We'd climbed the steep stone steps of Matusz's Tower, the castle's highest point, named for the local medieval Hungarian ruler Matusz Csák, who appears to have been something of a gangster.

He still gets a street named after him, as does the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

It was his troops that reached Trencin almost 1,850 years ago, leaving behind a Latin inscription in the Castle Rock, the northernmost known evidence of a Roman army in Central Europe.

The inscription is one of Trencin's oldest claims to fame.

It is about taking control of your interpretation and using it as a tool to strengthen your mind.

Great leaders and thinkers from Marcus Aurelius to modern masters of personal development agreed on one thing.

Adversity is the arena where inner strength is forged.

Now, in your everyday life, identify a current challenge.

The perspective of time allows you to look beyond urgency, beyond emotional noise, and find a space where calm can appear.

Every time you apply this perspective you train your mind, you begin to distinguish between what truly deserves your energy and what simply feeds your anxiety.

The great masters of Stoicism, from Seneca to Marcus Aurelius, constantly reminded themselves of this.

Life is filled with moments that seem critical, but most of them lose their power when we observe them from a temporal distance.

And really, you know, the sad part about that is your life is just passing you by.

All we really have, this is one of my favorite quotes from Meditations, a book by Marcus Aurelius.

I'm sure many of our audience has read it.

One of my favorite quotes from it is, each of us only has this present moment.

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Book 1 of The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

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The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Marcus Aurelius Translated by George Crystal 1888-1944 Book 1 I learned from my grandfather, Verus, to use good manners and to put restraint on anger.

In the famous memory of my father I had a pattern of modesty and manliness.

Of my mother I learned to be pious and generous, to keep myself not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts, and to live with a simplicity which is far from customary among the rich.

Welcome back to the Dialogue on Dialogue podcast.

In this series, I'm exploring the classic book, Meditations by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

And as a non-philosopher who has always been just a little bit stoic curious, I'm trying to take this classic text and pull out some of the important themes that I can use in a modern context.

This is Meditations, book five.

Marcus doesn't want to get out of bed.

And that's one of the things I continue to enjoy about meditations.

Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome.

But apparently, even the emperor sometimes wants to, uh... hit the ancient Roman version of the snooze button a few times before he gets out and conquers foreign lands.

It must be remembered that no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the present hour might be.

The most influential school of the later Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected in Marcus Aurelius, who frequently dwells on it in his meditations.

The rational soul, he says, wanders round the whole world and through the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that our posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors saw nothing greater than we have seen.

A man of forty years, possessing the most moderate intelligence, may be said to have seen all that is past and all that is to come.

It was thoroughly pessimistic and therefore incompatible with the idea of progress.

Lucretius himself allows an underlying feeling of skepticism as to the value of civilization occasionally to escape.

His eadem sunt omnia semper is the constant refrain of Marcus Aurelius.

Indeed, it might be said that in the mentality of the ancient Greeks there was a strain which would have rendered them indisposed to take such an idea seriously if it had been propounded.

There's a part that's offended, and it may have found when it was young that the way to handle this type of situation was to scream and act injured, emotionally, if not physically.

Even Marcus Aurelius was into parts.

He said, if something happens, the affected part of me may complain if they like, but if I don't interpret it as bad or evil, I'm not harmed.

No one compels me to do so.

Anatomically, we're the same.

Now, if we jump forward to the great thinkers, such as Aristotle, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius, who lived just 3,000 years ago or so, it's the same.

Their intellectual capabilities were the same as ours.

They could think and reason the same as we can.