“How beautifully Plato put it. Whenever you want to talk about people, it’s best to take a bird’s eye view and see everything all at once – of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings and divorces, births and deaths, noisy courtrooms or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets – all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites.” Marcus Aurelius Meditations, 7.48
Where have I lost the forest for the trees?
Heraclitus famously believed in a single divine law of the universe; he called it Logos. Where everything has an opposite and the interaction of the opposites results in constant change, while still remaining the same. Though change is a constant, our underlying reality remains the same. The common people, the folk, have a saying for the ages, “The more things change, the more things remain the same.”
Back to trying to take the 1,000-foot view. All the angst about the prospect of World War III, the decline of the economy, the death of democracy, etc., presupposes that we live in novel times. This is ludicrous. If I had a dollar for each time some talking head uses the word “unprecedented” or says the phrase, ” . . . for the first time in history,” I would be a rich man. When a polity thinks these things are true it becomes innervated, a colossus made of clay, unable to move. Fearful humans are ready to waste a life being afraid and isolated, thinking this has never happened before.
All of this has happened before and will happen again. I find joy in life, but at the same time, I am aware of events, not cowered by them. I refuse to waste the few remaining years of my life worrying about the course of events, especially events over which I have no control.
It always comes back to the controllables. Having said that, I will still forward a constant stream of commentary about the world as it occurs around me, some of it long hand and posted online, because it is cathartic and self-focusing. Writing it down helps me define exactly how I think about it. I gain clarity from the exercise as I look down.
