Putting things off
The thing you keep putting off
There is something you have been meaning to do. Not a small thing, or you would have done it. You know what it is, you know roughly what it would take, and every day you find a reason for it to be tomorrow's.
The best-known passage on this is the one about getting out of bed at dawn, Book 5, 1. It is not quoted here. It runs to over three hundred words in Long's translation, and this site quotes nothing the app would not show, which stops at two hundred. It is worth reading in full. The three below are shorter and, on this subject, sharper.
Marcus Aurelius
Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.
He is talking to himself, and he is not gentle. How long has this been put off, and how many chances have gone by? The argument is not that the task is urgent. It is that the time in which to do it is fixed, and that what is spent on putting it off is spent.
Marcus Aurelius
No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.
One sentence. He has caught himself doing the thing that stands in for doing: describing the person who would do it. The gap between talking about the work and doing it is the whole subject.
Marcus Aurelius
Practise thyself even in the things which thou despairest of accomplishing. For even the left hand, which is ineffectual for all other things for want of practice, holds the bridle more vigorously than the right hand; for it has been practised in this.
And a smaller, kinder observation. The left hand is worse at almost everything, and better at holding a bridle, because that is the one thing it has practiced. Ability follows practice, not the other way round. The thing you despair of doing is the thing you have not yet done often.
One question
What is the one part of it you could do today, before the reason for tomorrow arrives?
Meditations is quoted from George Long's translation of 1862, which is in the public domain. The passages are chosen by hand, shown as written, and never paraphrased.