How quickly all things disappear

Commentary on Meditations 2.12

The Roman court exposed Marcus Aurelius to the exhilaration and emptiness of reputation. Remember, people worshipped the Roman emperor as a God.

Amidst all this power, death was omnipresent. The daily realities of the plague, war, and child mortality were inescapable. Marcus Aurelius witnessed the wages of the Marcomannic wars first hand. Most of his children did not make it to adulthood. The plague that claimed so many of his subjects' lives would eventually take his own.

And despite all this, he told himself to embrace Nature and whatever she wills.

2.12

How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and especially those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or spread far by vapoury fame; how worthless, contemptible, and ignoble, and temporary, and dead they are – all this is the role of the intellectual faculty to observe.

To observe too those whose opinions and voices determine reputation; what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the power of reflection resolves into its parts all things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child.

Notes

The spiritual exercises in this section are simple and deep.

Contemplate the temporary nature of the world and that you will see that fame is a vapour, death is nothing to us, and Nature is not to be feared.

But how exactly do you do this?