The Line I Say to Myself

“Erase the false impressions from your mind by constantly saying to yourself, I have it in my soul to keep out any evil, desire, or any kind of disturbance. Instead, seeing the true nature of things, I will give them only their due. Always remember this power that nature gives you.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.29

I keep this passage close. Not because it’s clever, but because I need it more often than I’d like to admit.

No matter how well I plan my day, I will run into someone selfish, ungrateful, or just careless with other people. That’s not pessimism, it’s the weather. And however well I handle them, their actions often won’t line up with my values or what I expected. People are free to disappoint you, and they use that freedom often.

The Difficult Person

It usually goes like this. Someone breaks a commitment without warning. Or is short with me for no reason at all. Small things, mostly. None worth a real fight.

Still, I feel it right away. The frustration, the urge to fire back, the story I start telling myself about how unfair it is.

That spike is where everything hinges. What happens next is up to me, even though it never feels that way in the moment.

The Second Cost

Their action already happened. I can’t undo it. What I can do, and usually did before I knew better, is pay for it twice.

The first cost is the thing itself. The second cost is what I do with it afterward. I replay it on the drive home. I bring it to dinner and I’m only half there. I let one person’s careless five minutes set the tone for my whole evening. By then the original offender is asleep, untroubled, and I’m the one still carrying it.

That second cost is the one that actually ruins the day, and it’s the one I built myself.

What I Actually Say

The passage above is long. In the moment, nobody recites a paragraph of Roman philosophy at themselves. It doesn’t work that way. So I distilled it down to something short enough to reach for under stress:

I have the power within me to keep that out. I can see the truth.

That’s the whole mantra. I say it, and it buys me a gap, half a second between what happened and what I do next. The provocation is still there, the frustration is still there, but now there’s a small space around it instead of a straight line from their action to my reaction.

In that gap, I sort it out. Is this actually mine to carry, or just my ego asking to be defended? Does it touch something I value, or does it only sting? Then I give it what Marcus calls its due, no more than that. Most slights, it turns out, are owed very little.

The real move is separation. Their action is theirs. My response is mine. They own what they did. I own what I do with it. The mantra doesn’t make me a better person than them, it just keeps the two ledgers from getting mixed up.

It’s Not Just People

The same method works on more than just difficult people, which is how I know it’s the method and not the situation.

A setback shows up, an effort that didn’t pay off, a result that went the other way. Or a plan I was attached to falls apart and the day reorganizes itself without my permission. Different provocation, identical trap: let the thing outside me decide the state inside me.

The line works there too. The setback is the setback. Whether I spend the next hour stewing over it is a separate question, and that one’s mine to answer.

The Practice

I want to be honest about what this does and doesn’t do. It does not make the frustration disappear. I still feel the spike. Difficult people still get under my skin, setbacks still sting, and some days I reach for the line a beat too late and stew anyway. (I am not a Roman emperor, and my inbox reminds me of that daily.)

What changed is that I’m no longer simply run by it. The gap is always there, every time, waiting to be used. That’s the power Marcus names right at the end, “always remember this power that nature gives you.” For a long time I read that as something grand. I think now he just meant the gap. It costs nothing, it’s available on demand, and most of us forget it exists exactly when we need it.

So I keep saying the line.

I have the power to keep that out. I can see the truth. Give it only its due.