What You Can Control

If you suppose anything which lies out of your command to be good or evil, your missing the one or falling into the other will unavoidably make you a malcontent against the gods, and cause you to hate those people whom you either know or suspect to be instrumental in your misfortune. To be plain, our being concerned for these objects often makes us very unreasonable and unjust. But if we confine the notion of good and evil to things in our power, then all the motives to complaint will drop off; then we shall neither remonstrate against Heaven, nor quarrel with any mortal living. - Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

My takeaway from this quote is that worrying about and categorizing things that I cannot control only serves to make one bitter and discontent against the rest of the world, leading them to be blind to the smaller pleasures of life that make it worth living. I tend to be someone who enjoys having things preferably under my control (being able to influence and make sense of what goes on in my life), leading outside change to really throw me off balance and mess up my state of mind. I also like the analogy of this quote with good and evil, I think it’s pretty clever to use such an age-old deeply engrained idea to begin to address more complicated issues.

-Jordan, Founder’s Class, Session 1