Marcus Aurelius Meditations
Marcus Aurelius: All things that thou seest, will soon…
All things that thou seest, will soon be perished, and they that see their corruptions, will soon vanish away themselves. He that dieth a hundred years old, and he that dieth young, shall come all to one.
The passage follows a public-domain translation of Meditations. The reading beside it is ours.
Everything visible is on its way out: buildings, institutions, possessions, faces, and the people watching them change. Death at twenty and death at one hundred differ emotionally and practically, but both are brief points against the scale of time. Marcus is not asking us to treat years as worthless. He is asking us to stop pretending that a longer timeline makes us exempt from the same human condition. This can soften envy. The person with more wealth, beauty, or attention is not traveling to a different destination. It can also sharpen gratitude. Because time is limited, an ordinary meal, walk, or conversation does not need to be exceptional to be precious. Today, do not spend the day negotiating with the fact of impermanence. Use it as a compass. Put energy into character and relationships, the things that make a short life honorable rather than merely long.
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