Then, as now, there was a lot of noise.

There were people who had their own agendas. People who wanted to compromise. People who wanted to explain it away. People who thought there were bigger problems. 

One of the most powerful scenes in the history of cinema captures all of this coming to a head. Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln is surrounded by grousing and squabbling cabinet members as he pushes for passage of the 13th Amendment. He slams his open hand down on the table. It buys a second of silence. 

“Now, now, now,” he says. “We are stepped out on the world’s stage, the fate of human dignity is in our hands… See what is before you. See the here and now, that’s the hardest thing, the only thing that accounts.”

I think of this scene often, but especially lately. Because there are many people who seem to be unable to do that. Who seem to think the situation we are in follows along the same partisan lines as the rest of the ongoing culture war. There seem to be many people who think there is something to argue about here, that it can be explained away, that this is just an extension of that discussion we’ve been having as a society for some time now about “privilege.”

No. 

The fact that my publisher sends me early copies of books before they are released, that’s a privilege. Something I didn’t earn, something that can disappear, something that I enjoy but am not entitled to. 

Not being gunned down in the street by hillbilly vigilantes? Not having the life slowly squeezed out of me on suspicion of some minor crime? 

That’s not a privilege. 

That’s a constitutional right. Actually, it’s more than a constitutional right. According to the Founding Fathers and many philosophers before and since, the rights to life and liberty and property are beyond constitutional: They are inalienable.

The right not to be murdered, to not be harassed by people with guns, to not be targeted, exploited or incarcerated unfairly, to speak your mind, to pursue your religion, for your home to be a safe haven, these are not things that governments give to their people. These are things that God—or generations of evolution and progress—have endowed us with at birth, and we in turn give governments the powers to protect.

All of us.

What you are seeing in the video where a police officer kneels on the neck of a black man crying for air and his mother, what is happening in a video where a black man is strangled to death over selling cigarettes on the street, what has been occurring in my county where Latinos are targeted with ticky-tack traffic violations so they can be detained and then deported, is a betrayal of that compact. It’s a heinous violation of the rights of human beings.

Right here. Within your borders. Filmed for you to watch on your television or phone. 

It is essential that you see it this way. Because when you do, you realize that this affects you, it affects everyone. Directly. Urgently. 

Black. White. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. Republican. Democrat. Socialist. Idiot. If that’s threatened for one person, for one community, it’s threatened for all people. 

I’ll say it again: Not being extrajudicially murdered is not a privilege, it’s not an “exception,” it’s more than a tragedy. To try to categorize it as those things is to woefully fail to describe the injustice that is being done in modern America (and elsewhere). Callous indifference to suffering by the authorities towards minorities or the poor or the voiceless is not just a lamentable fact of modern life, it’s an active crime. 

In real life, Lincoln said that if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. If kneeling on an unarmed, compliant man’s neck for nine minutes is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If chasing down someone you think was maybe breaking into a house (not your house, even) and then blowing them apart with a shotgun in broad daylight is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If putting children in cages is not wrong, nothing is wrong. Even if those were the only examples ever, that would be important. That in and of itself would suffice as a major issue that would need to be addressed, before it got worse.

But of course, they are not the only examples. 

The moral imperative to do something about it is ancient. Marcus Aurelius wrote two thousand years ago that “you can also commit an injustice by doing nothing.” The Stoics believed that harm to one was to harm all. Martin Luther King explained this idea of sympatheia beautifully. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I understand that this might not be what you want to hear from me. I write about self-improvement. I write about philosophy. I write about history. That’s true. 

But what do you think the point of the study of those three things are? It’s not so you can make a little more money. It’s not so you can live in your own bubble or have interesting dinner conversations. It’s so you can be better. So you can do the right thing when it counts. 

You have to realize that if the state can find ways to deprive someone of their rights, then they can find ways to deprive you of yours. In fact, this is an inexorable law of power, whether it’s held by segregationists or Stalin, bureaucrats following orders or malevolent dictators. When you give power an inch, it takes another. When you allow evil to happen because you are not its victim, it will inevitably find its way to you—or if not you, to someone you love, or to your great-great-grandchildren. 

That’s what Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” is about. You know it: 

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemöller’s words were not theoretical. He tolerated, even complied with, policies he didn’t agree with. He rationalized them assuming his Christian church would be protected. For a while, it was. But in the end, Niemöller found himself in Dachau, where he nearly died. Someone later asked how he could have been so self-absorbed, so silent when it mattered. “I am paying for that mistake now,” he said, “and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”

Well, here we are, stepped out on the world’s stage again. Can you see that? Can you see that everyone is watching? Can you grasp the here-and-now? Can you feel what is in your hands? 

It’s the hardest thing, but it’s the only thing that counts. 

Everything else is noise. Everything else is wrong. 

Now. Now. Now. 

To say that Marcus Aurelius had a stressful life would be a preposterous understatement. 

He ran the largest empire in the world. He had a troublesome son. He had a nagging and painful stomach issue. There was a palace coup led by one of his closest friends. Rumors that his wife was unfaithful. The Parthians invaded the Roman client-state of Armenia, triggering a war that would last five years.. The Antonine Plague struck in 165 CE and killed, by conservative estimates, more than 10 million. The River Tiber had one of the worst floods in history, destroying homes and livestock and leaving Rome in famine.  

Should we be surprised that he talks openly in Meditations about his anxiety? About losing his temper? That he sometimes felt ground down and exhausted by life?

Of course he did. 

He had all our problems and more. 

He was besieged by stress. 

And yet that’s exactly why he inspires us. Because he conquered that stress, just like we can. 

“Today I escaped anxiety,” he writes. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”

How did he do that? What can he show us about slaying that demon of stress that we all suffer from?

A lot. 

For starters, the fact that we even know about his anxiety is because of one of those strategies. It was in the pages of his journal that Marcus worked through his problems. Instead of letting racing thoughts dominate his mind and drive him crazy, he put them down on paper. It was also in these pages that Marcus prepared himself for difficulties in advance. He reminded himself that the people he was going to meet during the day would be troublesome, he reminded himself that things were not going to go perfectly, he reminded himself that getting angry never made things better. 

By taking the time to journal and write, he was chipping away at his anxiety, just as we all can–in the morning, at night, on our lunch break. Whenever. 

To calm his anxiety, Marcus was also constantly trying to get perspective. Sometimes he zoomed way out. He meditated on his insignificance. “The infinity of past and future gapes before us,” he wrote, “a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress.”Other times, he zoomed way in, telling himself to take things step by step, moment by moment. No one can stop you from that, he said. Concentrate like a Roman, he said, on what’s in front of you like it’s the last thing you’re doing in your life. 

Don’t worry about what’s happened in the past or what might happen in the future. 

This idea of being present is key to overcoming our stress.

We are often anxious because of what we fear will happen next, or after what happens next. We worry about worst case scenarios. We dread potential obstacles. But Marcus, from Epictetus, knew that “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.”

That’s why Marcus Aurelius spent some much time trying to be present, reminding himself to return to the present moment where nothing is “novel or hard to deal with, but familiar and easily handled.”. 

Like all busy people, Marcus Aurelius had a million things going on. But he also knew that much of what people expected of him or even that he found himself focusing on was not important or necessary. So to reduce stress, he tried hard to separate the essential from the inessential. 

“If you seek tranquility, do less.” But then he makes a critical clarification, “Or (more accurately) do what’s essential… Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time.” 

Was there stuff he had to do that he didn’t want to do? Problems he was stuck with that he’d rather not be stuck with? You bet. That’s life. 

Which is why he, and all of us, have to practice acceptance. 

That’s all we need, he said, willing acceptance at every moment. You can scream “until you turn blue” and curse the world “as if the world would notice!” Or you can “accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given.”

Finally, Marcus Aurelius worked hard to be a good friend to himself. Although he was firm and strong and self-disciplined, he did not whip himself. He knew that it was inevitable that he would mess up. We all do. 

The key, he said, is to just focus on getting back on track. Don’t dwell. Don’t call yourself an idiot. Don’t smack your forehead in anger. 

No, “get back up when you fail,” he said, “celebrate behaving like a human.” “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” he said, “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.”

It would be wonderful if we didn’t have to do any of this. 

If life was easy. If things always went right. 

That’s just not possible though. 

Stress is an inevitable part of life. It is the friction of the plates of our responsibility rubbing against each other. 

But if stress is inevitable, anxiety and anger and worry are not. Marcus believed that these things were a choice. That we could work past them, through them, that we could discard them, as he said, because they are within us, or at least up to us. 

We can slay our stress because it’s not an external enemy. 

It is an inner battle. 

Odysseus is the greatest hero in all of literature. 

He fights for ten years at Troy and then, in a stroke of brilliance, manages to end the war with a clever trick.

Then for another ten years he fights his way home—facing storms, temptation, a Cyclops, deadly whirlpools, food shortages, the underworld, and a six-headed monster to return to his beloved wife and son. 

Arriving in Ithaca, Odysseus finds his kingdom drained by thirsty suitors who will not leave. One against 100 men vying to court his wife—he defeats them all, returning to the bed and the woman and the boy he had missed so badly. 

A true hero, no? A timeless icon of perseverance, commitment and duty. 

Or maybe not. Maybe Odysseus is a tragic figure. Maybe he’s someone to pity. Because in reality—to the extent there is realness in all myths—he’s actually a broken, selfish addict. 

It’s easy to miss unless you read all the way to the end of the poem. In fact, in some translations it’s cut off. In others it is simply ignored. 

See, the first thing a normal healthy person would do upon returning home from such an epic odyssey, would be to celebrate, to breathe a sigh of relief, to enjoy it. But what does Odysseus do? He doesn’t express gratitude to the gods for guiding his journey. He doesn’t take a well-deserved rest or appreciate all that remains—including his sweet wife, his only child and his aging father—despite his prolonged absence.  

Instead he seizes this moment, as Emily Wilson beautifully translates, to deliver this insane speech to his long-suffering wife:

But now we have returned to our own bed,

As we both longed to do. You must look after

My property inside the house. Meanwhile,

I have to go on raids, to steal replacements

For all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed,

And get the other Greeks to give me more,

until I fill my folds.

Twenty years away… and the first thing he wants to do is leave again! How sad is that? How tortured a mind must be to make that priority number one? 

You sit with that scene for a moment and you begin to realize that maybe it wasn’t fate that caused all these problems for Odysseus, it was his own restlessness. It was his inability to be still. The monsters he fought and fled on the long journey home weren’t external, they were internal. And then you realize the truth of what the Stoics said: there’s a fine line between being courageous and being reckless. 

If you’ve ever read the Tennyson poem about Odysseus, this last oft-ignored bit from Homer’s version might shine a whole different light on what Tennyson was actually getting at. It’s not that Odysseus is the brave striver, who refuses to yield, “made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.” It’s actually that he’s addicted to the road, to work, incapable of peace. Tennyson wasn’t praising Odysseus, he was weeping for him, damning him with his own nature:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

…

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

Of course, Odysseus isn’t unique. He is us. He’s the human condition in a nutshell. As Blaise Pascal put it, “all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room.” Because we cannot be happy, because we can’t just be, we waste years of our life. 

We go begging for trouble. We invent problems. We busy ourselves. We neglect our families. We flee, as Seneca once put it, from ourselves. Then we justify it, pride ourselves on it, point to our restlessness and call it ambition or responsibility. 

There is a haunting clip of Joan Rivers, well into her seventies, already one of the most accomplished and respected and talented comedians of all time, in which she is asked why she keeps working, why she is always on the road, always looking for more gigs. Telling the interviewer about the fear that drives her, she holds up an empty calendar. “If my book ever looked like this, it would mean that nobody wants me, that everything I ever tried to do in life didn’t work. Nobody cared and I’ve been totally forgotten.” Here is someone who thinks she is nothing and doesn’t matter if she isn’t doing something for even a few days. It’s one of the saddest things a person has ever said without realizing it. 

The Odyssey, like this unwitting admission from Rivers, is a cautionary tale. It is a beautifully epic reminder that stillness is the key to that which we all seek. “People try to get away from it all,” Marcus Aurelius said, “to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul.” There, said the man who had the means and the power to justify doing anything and going anywhere, is where you “reach utter stillness.”

Stillness is how you connect to yourself and others. Stillness is where true happiness comes from. 

Indeed, that’s the mistake the ceaselessly busy make. They think they are better for the frenzy, in fact, it’s the moments of stillness that afford them the ability to be so busy. Stillness was where Joan Rivers did her best writing—no one can write without quiet and reflection. Stillness, ironically, is how Odysseus waited out six-headed monsters and ship-swallowing storms. It wasn’t in rushing out to sea or to the next meeting or to the next opportunity. Stillness was how he connected with Penelope, it was the marriage bed he had made for them, that he so brilliantly described that made her realize that this unrecognizable man was the husband who had been gone so long.

The events of the world have conspired in this moment to demand that you ask yourself:

Where is all this rushing taking you? What direction was Odysseus pointing his ship? We are rushing toward death. A life of restlessness is not what we’re after. A life filled with endless activity… in the end, it is nothing. That’s not where meaning comes from.

 No one is saying that Odysseus should just lay back and lounge for the rest of his life—but if he can’t take even a few minutes with his family after that long of an absence, something is wrong with him. Turns out the war with Troy was the sideshow—the real battle was in this guy’s head and heart… fought against the fear of not doing something, of not being in motion constantly, of the mistaken prospect that to be still was to be dead. And so it is for you. 

We fight the curse of ambition and drive. 

There is no greatness that is not at peace, Seneca reminds us. There is no greatness if we cannot be. We must take the odyssey within. We must be still.