Constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and to make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants and children? Go deeper.
Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking to call it in. And some aren’t, but they’re still aware of it—still regard it as a debt. But others don’t even do that. They’re like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return.
People exist for one another. You can instruct or endure them.
You participate in a society by your existence. Then participate in its life through your actions—all your actions. Any action not directed toward a social end is a disturbance to your life, an obstacle to wholeness, a source of dissension.
To enter others’ minds and let them enter yours.
A branch cut away from the branch beside it is simultaneously cut away from the whole tree. So too a human being separated from another is cut loose from the whole community. The branch is cut off by someone else. But people cut themselves off—through hatred, through rejection—and don’t realize that they’re cutting themselves off from the whole civic enterprise… We can reattach ourselves and become once more components of the whole. But if the rupture is too often repeated, it makes the severed part hard to reconnect, and to restore. You can see the difference between the branch that’s been there since the beginning, remaining on the tree and growing with it, and the one that’s been cut off and grafted back.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking to call it in. And some aren’t, but they’re still aware of it—still regard it as a debt. But others don’t even do that. They’re like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return.
People exist for one another. You can instruct or endure them.
You participate in a society by your existence. Then participate in its life through your actions—all your actions. Any action not directed toward a social end is a disturbance to your life, an obstacle to wholeness, a source of dissension.
To enter others’ minds and let them enter yours.
A branch cut away from the branch beside it is simultaneously cut away from the whole tree. So too a human being separated from another is cut loose from the whole community. The branch is cut off by someone else. But people cut themselves off—through hatred, through rejection—and don’t realize that they’re cutting themselves off from the whole civic enterprise… We can reattach ourselves and become once more components of the whole. But if the rupture is too often repeated, it makes the severed part hard to reconnect, and to restore. You can see the difference between the branch that’s been there since the beginning, remaining on the tree and growing with it, and the one that’s been cut off and grafted back.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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