May 29
Much that is superfluous, and lies wholly in your own imagination, you can cut away — and at once make ample room for yourself: by embracing the whole universe in thought, contemplating eternal time, the swift change of every single thing.
Meditations IX.32 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Much that is superfluous, and lies wholly in your own imagination, you can cut away — and at once make ample room for yourself: by embracing the whole universe in thought, contemplating eternal time, the swift change of every single thing.
Some slights only grow once they are long over. A barbed remark in a meeting, a curt reply, and in the evening you carry on the conversation on your own. Better comebacks occur to you, the other person grows sharper in your version, and beneath everything you have added, the sentence that was actually spoken almost disappears.
That is when a larger scale can help. In ten years no one will remember this meeting, probably not even you. The scene in your head shrinks, and it really does weigh on you less.
The trouble is that the same scale works in both directions. Your own brusque tone yesterday becomes small too, and the apology you still owe seems hardly worth mentioning. The wide view does not, of its own accord, distinguish between what you talked yourself into and what actually hurt another person. It makes both equally light.
Which part lay only in your imagination and which reached someone else, you can see only up close.
