Marcus Aurelius Meditations
Marcus Aurelius: All substances come soon to their…
All substances come soon to their change, and either they shall be resolved by way of exhalation (if so be that all things shall be reunited into one substance), or as others maintain, they shall be scattered and dispersed.
The passage follows a public-domain translation of Meditations. The reading beside it is ours.
Everything you can touch is in the middle of changing. Bodies age, companies reorganize, possessions break, and the version of you who wanted something desperately eventually disappears too. Marcus does not offer this as a reason for despair. He offers it as relief. If change is the normal condition of things, then change is not a betrayal of the plan. We suffer when we demand that a job, relationship, home, or identity remain fixed because it has been good to us. Nothing has made that promise. The point is not to love less; it is to hold what you love with awareness and gratitude. Use what is here well while it is here. Repair what can be repaired. Release what cannot. The world is always dissolving and becoming something else. Your task is to meet that movement without clinging so tightly that every change feels like an injustice.
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