“C

July    8th

STOP    MONKEYING   AROUND

“Enough of  this    miserable,  whining life.   Stop    monkeying   around! Why are you troubled?   What’s

new here?   What’s  so  confounding?    The one responsible?    Take    a   good    look.   Or  just    the matter

itself? Then    look    at  that.   There’s nothing else    to  look    at. And as  far as  the gods    go, by  now you

could   try being   more    straightforward and kind.   It’s    the same,   whether you’ve  examined    these

things  for a   hundred years,  or  only    three.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS,   MEDITATIONS,    9.37

haracter,” Joan Didion would write in one of her best essays, “the willingness to accept
responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”
Marcus is urging us not to waste time complaining about what we haven’t got or how things have
worked out. We have to quit monkeying around and be the owners of our own lives. Character can be
developed, and when it is, self-respect will ensue. But that means starting and getting serious about it. Not
later, not after certain questions have been answered or distractions dealt with, but now. Right now.
Taking responsibility is the first step.
To be without this character is the worst of all fates. As Didion put it in “On Self-Respect,” “To live
without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the phenobarbital, and the
sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the
promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.”
You’re so much better than that.