Run Alongside the Cart

“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” (Marcus Aurlieus, Meditations, 2.1)

Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was a Roman Emperor following the reigns of Hadrian and Marcus’s adoptive father Antoninus Pius. Throughout his life he attempted to live life philosophically. Back then, philosophy was seen as a way of life, something that should be practiced everyday. A philosopher was not someone who merely wrote an academic treatise or book, but a person who lived as a philosopher. That is, a person who did his or her best to examine their own life through philosophical inquiry and use it to live a flourishing life, one free from anxiety and psychological pain. To aid in this process a philosopher would engage in, what Pierre Hadot calls, “spiritual exercises” or exercises of the soul. They were like training aids that helped people live philosophically. The Meditations is Marcus’s own spiritual exercises, things that he wrote down, worked and reworked, and tried to integrate into his life. This work was not meant for a general audience, but for himself alone (the work is more accurately titled “To Himself”). What I want to do here is dig into the passage above and see how we can use it as a spiritual exercise for our own lives. I’ll attempt to interweave what Marcus might mean by the passage with how we can use it in our own lives today.

Let’s start with the first sentence: 

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.

This is similar to the adage “prepare for the worse.” We all know this, but don’t practice it everyday. We know that there will be morning traffic when we drive to work, and people, just like us, are rushing to get to work. Yet we still get upset and frustrated when we are crawling along on the freeway. We also know that we are not perfect and have our own character flaws, yet we demand perfection from others and are overly harsh and critical of them when they exhibit their own flaws. This does not mean we have to condone such behavior, but we must try to accept the fact that human beings are imperfect and that there is a real possibility that we will have to deal with such behavior on a regular basis. Marcus is telling himself to not be surprised when people act this way. By having reasonable expectations, we might not freak out as much when someone cuts us off on the freeway or be pleasantly surprised when someone treats us well. 

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.

Here Marcus is telling himself that we are often blind to our own flaws and the potential harm that follows from them. He acknowledges that we are all human and the person who cuts us off or treats us poorly cannot hurt and undermine our character or soul. This idea is grounded in the thought that you cannot control  how people treat you, but you can control how you react and respond to their treatment. If someone cuts you off on the freeway, you can either get upset, yell, bang the steering wheel and honk the horn, or you can let it go and not let someone else’s behavior determine your own. By doing the latter, we are exercising our free will and taking responsibility for our own behavior. This is very difficult to do, and we have to work on it everyday. We can be sure that Marcus did his best to think about and practice this everyday. 

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.

Marcus recognizes that we are social animals and believes that the universe is rationally ordered and thereby unfolds in a rational way. This means that everything has its place and we must, to a certain extent, accept what happens. To do otherwise, would be irrational, and therefore wrong. This relates to the Stoic dog and cart analogy which states that a dog tied to a cart has to go where the cart goes, but the dog can decide whether to fight against the cart or run alongside of it. Marcus is telling himself to run alongside the cart (i.e. the universe). We can’t control how the universe will unfold but we can control how we respond to it. Extreme anger, hate, and resentment is a sign that we are letting things control our emotions and actions. We may not agree with everything Marcus says here, but I think he makes an important distinction between what we can control and what we can’t control. In the end we really need to pay attention to how we conduct ourselves and respond to others. By doing this, we will be running alongside the cart and not be dragged behind it.

To sum up,  Marcus advises us to have reasonable expectations when going into potentially difficult situations, and if your expectations are met, great, if not, then you have control over how you respond. This is pretty simple, straightforward advice. However, the hard part is putting it into practice. We have to do this “spiritual exercise” everyday so that it becomes second nature to us. If done right, there’s a good chance that we will reduce the stress and anxiety in our lives. Not a bad deal. 

Run Alongside the Cart by Philosophical Living is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.