I was reading the second book of Mediation By Marcus Aurelius
- When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
It’s very strange for me that the first annotation talks about acceptance and cooperation with each other. Marcus Aurelius said to accept every human being as they are. Sometimes we wonder why that happens to us or why others behave strangly. Later, I discovered that people were with us until we had common goals. When they achieved their shared interest, they changed. They betrayed.
Jealousy is a natural phenomenon. People can be jealous of us without any reason. Same rule apply to us, we are also jealous a few people.
In life, people motivate us to achieve something; under the hood, they are going to achieve their own goals. And when they achieved those goals, they betrayed us.
People behave badly with us. They are arrogant; they do it intensely to get attention; they know we reflect back on them; or they like the pain or misery on our faces. However, it’s possible that their actions are a result of their circumstances. But the question is: why do we expect good behavior from them? They are busy in their own world. We seek outside approval only when we are not satisfied with ourselves. Therefore, seek approval from within.
Marcus Aurelius says that all these people have the same mind as we do, and everything I see or feel is related to us.
Ancient people believed that all people shared the same spite and that all people connected with each other in some way. Marcus Aurelius talks about other people who are not our blood relatives but who have very similar minds, bodies, and spirits. If we see something evil in others, we should first find it in ourselves and correct it rather than criticizing.
Most of the time, the situation is not a problem, but the reaction to it creates a problem. It’s our thoughts. Understanding this prevents them from hurting us, the situation, and other people’s behavior. In simple Urdu, “asa hee hayee, churo isya.” “Accept them as they are; let it go.”.
Most of the time, stress does not come from situations, but our reaction to those situations creates a problem. No matter how badly people treat us, we can still control our response. How we feel and think. If we control our inner world, it can have no impact on us. And no one can make us angry and respond in an evil way.
Marcus Aurelius talks about how every person has different qualities. And no one has all of those qualities. God creates in such a way that people can work together. They work with each other to build a functional body. Similar to different body parts of the human body, each part cannot function individually and has different functions to perform. All human body parts work together, so a human being survived. Its nature’s rule that humans have to cooperate with each other.
It’s our divine duty to work with each other, not against each other.
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