Simple Stoic Advice
A State of Constant Change
A State of Constant Change
The beautiful thing about Stoic philosophy is the advice contained within it is just as applicable today as it was when it was first written all those many years ago. We can learn a great deal from interpreting the advice provided and using it to our advantage as we go throughout our own lives.
Today’s quote comes to us courtesy of Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12.21:
Quote
“Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.”
Advice
Throughout the Meditations, one can see Marcus reassuring himself not to fear death, that it is natural, that it is the proper progression of life.
Marcus’ constant reframing of situations (such as death) is what helped to bring tranquility to him. It is clear from reading Meditations that at some point in his philosophical training, the works of Heraclitus, the early Greek philosopher, were studied by Marcus, as well as the early Stoics.
Heraclitus believed that the balancing of opposite forces is what kept the universe together. He believed that it was through this tension that built between these two opposites that we all live. While Heraclitus lived from 535–475, some 200 years before Marcus, we can see the impact his thinking had on the philosopher-king.
Heraclitus’ Fragments, the only thing that remains of his writings, show a man who believed the world was in a constant state of change. Built within this constant tension was also constant change of opposites, one leading to the other. For example, one of his surviving fragments reads:
“What was scattered
gathers.
What was gathered
blows apart.”
Elsewhere in another fragment, he writes:
“Air dies giving birth
to fire. Fire dies
giving birth to air. Water,
thus, is born of dying
earth, and earth of water.”
Throughout Meditations, Marcus writes similarly of antagonistic themes such as:
“Constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.”
And also referencing the life cycle of nature:
“You have functioned as a part of something; you will vanish into what produced you. Or be restored, rather.”
Remember that change is not unnatural, on the contrary, it is built into the fabric of our universe, that everything is changing. Things are born, while others die. Empire rise while others fall. It is all cyclical.
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