Sometimes it can feel like you’re a solitary warrior.
Certainly Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations reads like that at times. He feels like the last honest man. The last good man. The only one keeping the faith.
We often feel that way about the cause we’re fighting for. We feel that way about the trauma we carry from childhood. About our fears. That it’s just us against the world.
But this is wrong.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, but then you start reading and you realize as Baldwin did that “it was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
This is sort of the irony of Meditations. The private diary intended for no one…manages to appeal to the many. It becomes universal. Marcus’s life and pain and loss were so unique…yet so relatable. If only other emperors had written such a book—or if anyone had—maybe he could have read it and felt a little less alone, comforted by that sense of sympatheia, of his timeless connections to such a diverse world.
Well, it’s not too late for us. Like James Baldwin, you gotta read to free yourself from the yoke of doom and gloom that finds its way around your neck when you think you’re the only one who’s ever worn it. You have to get outside yourself. You have to enter other people’s minds and let them enter yours—which is something Marcus talked about. You have to understand you’re not alone. Your struggles are shared. There are people struggling even more than you are.
Connect with them—even if they’re long dead. And if you can, try to put some of your own thoughts out there. It may just help someone who needs it.
When you need encouragement, Marcus said, look at the people around you and who came before you. “Give yourself time to learn something new and good,” he said, “and cease to be whirled around.” If you’re ready to give yourself that time, check out our 13-day email challenge, Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge. It will transform not just the way you learn from books, but your life.
P.S. This was originally sent on April 14, 2021. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.
