Patterns of Thought

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."
- Marcus Aurelius

He's right, of course. It's easy enough to say, but like all things, it is something else entirely to come to comprehend this as a truth deeply, to "feel it in your bones." Time has done much to bring it closer to me, to help me understand exactly how it operates - how it is true as a function of the machinery of the world which acts on all of us. 

I suppose I came to understand it first as I vacillated for many years back and forth into and out of depression. It became apparent to me that nothing much was actually changing in the world - that only the way I judged myself was shifting. Those days, I didn't do much - I was fixated on discovering a good life to live, a way to be self-satisfied as a function of the outer world. I pursued this mostly by observing the world passively, as if I might notice something that I could then put into action. It would take years for me to see that this effort was misguided, as I repeatedly fit whatever spurious explanations I could find onto the fleeting satisfactions that came to me. Maybe they were, even, brought in by the tide of the outer world, but that is hardly the point - what kept me from happiness was myself, my own evaluation of myself, that I had failed at something profound - the keeping of a self-opinion that accepted myself for who I was.

The proverbial role of "responsible adult" has since brought the same puzzle back to me in a new form. I find my time overcome by the roles and responsibilities into which I have stepped, and I am sad for it - disappointed that all the effort I have put towards freeing myself of obligation has gone the other way. What is to be made of this disconnect? Did I make some mistake in failing to do what I set out to, or have I fundamentally misperceived what has happened?

Maybe both. I certainly can't rule out that I have made one or more mistakes, by my own criteria - that I have acted in a way contrary to my goals. But I think the larger issue - and probably larger by far - is that I have misperceived what has occurred. The state I find myself in today is simply one where I am too eager to picture myself the victim of time and circumstance, to feel helpless when I am not. The evidence for the alternative - that there is no time to be had, nothing to be done for me - evaporates when I force myself to look upon my situation, and especially when I force myself to observe what other people have proven possible. There is nothing in my day that precludes me from having what I want except my own eagerness to jump to reductive and self-defeating conclusions of what I am capable of.

What kind of life will I live if I allow this to continue? I think this implies a tragedy that stoicism understands. When Seneca stated that we must live every moment to its fullest, it was with an almost mathematical formulation, that there is only one path to living our own best life, and that is to control our patterns of thought to see each day, and each moment, for what it is: opportunities we will never again possess.