On beginning again

Marcus wrote this in his private notebooks sometime in the 170s AD, during the Marcomannic Wars, a campaign that dragged on for years with no clean resolution. He was emperor of Rome and commander of a frontier war that kept not ending. The present was all he had reliable access to.

The instruction is harder than it sounds. We are built to drag the past forward and project the future backward into now. Most of what we call thinking is actually rehearsing: old conversations, imagined confrontations, scenarios that haven't happened. The present moment is the only one in which anything can actually be done. Marcus wasn't telling himself to be carefree. He was telling himself to be useful: here, now, with what's in front of him.