pain · you regret losing a thing · relationships · God
what you just named
You came in pain, not joy: that you regret losing a thing, in your relationships — specifically with God — and you reached for the Stoic voice first. That's what you've named. Listen now to what it answers.
- Stoic
Spirit
mind
The regret says the abandonment is in the past, fixed, and cannot be undone. Marcus does not promise that the past can be unmade. He gives instead a morning resolution. Begin the morning by saying to yourself what you will meet today. The practice you abandoned ended one morning. The return to it begins another morning, the same way. Not by an argument about lost years. By saying to yourself, this morning, what kind of day you intend, and by beginning to live as if the practice were not abandoned but resumed. Each morning you have a fresh ledger. The lost mornings are not paid back; they are simply no longer the morning you are in.
heart
Make this morning a resumption morning. Not an apology. Not a vow. A return.
connection
You stand in the line of all who began again with the morning — the old monk who took up the office at sixty, the prodigal at the trough, the lapsed Christian who showed up to mass on a Tuesday after a decade.
Action
Tomorrow morning, before the day's first task, say to yourself out loud what kind of day you intend. Do the next thing the practice asks. Do not promise the morning after.
Reference
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1
practice
The morning resumption
principle
The return begins one morning at a time, the way the leaving did
value
The morning as a fresh ledger