Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option:- to accept this event with humility [will];
- to treat this person as he should be treated [action];
- to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in
[perception].
We find the same triad rephrased and reordered in
Meditations 9.6: “Objective judgment... Unselfish action..
. Willing acceptance... of all external events.”
And we find it in a more subtle form underlying
Meditations 8.7:
... progress for a rational mind means not accepting falsehood or uncertainty
in its perceptions, making unselfish actions its only aim, seeking and shunning
only the things it has control over, embracing what nature demands of it—the
nature in which it participates, as the leaf’s nature does in the tree’s.
A score of other entries could be cited. The almost obsessive
repetition of these three points suggests that they lie at the
very heart of Marcus’s thought, and of his project in the
Meditations.