W

February    2nd

A   PROPER  FRAME   OF  MIND

“Frame  your    thoughts    like    this—you    are an  old person, you won’t   let yourself    be  enslaved    by  this

any longer, no  longer  pulled  like    a   puppet  by  every   impulse,    and you’ll  stop    complaining about

your    present fortune or  dreading    the future.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS,   MEDITATIONS,    2.2

e resent the person who comes in and tries to boss us around. Don’t tell me how to dress, how to
think, how to do my job, how to live. This is because we are independent, self-sufficient people.
Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.
Yet if someone says something we disagree with, something inside us tells us we have to argue with
them. If there’s a plate of cookies in front of us, we have to eat them. If someone does something we
dislike, we have to get mad about it. When something bad happens, we have to be sad, depressed, or
worried. But if something good happens a few minutes later, all of a sudden we’re happy, excited, and
want more.
We would never let another person jerk us around the way we let our impulses do. It’s time we start
seeing it that way—that we’re not puppets that can be made to dance this way or that way just because we
feel like it. We should be the ones in control, not our emotions, because we are independent, self-
sufficient people.