Loving Your Nature

You don't love yourself enough. Or you'd love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they're really possessed by what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book V

Sometimes, studying philosophy feels like getting slapped in the face by a historical figure. I read, “You don’t love yourself enough,” and felt personally attacked by a dead Roman emperor.

I’m in a day treatment program for six hours, five days a week, for ninety days. At least 85% of the classes boil down to: how to think better of yourself. I’ve been inundated with strategies, techniques, and methodologies to treat myself better, think more highly of myself, and improve my view of my life. It’s been almost sixty days of treatment so far and I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten the message. There are moments, certainly, where I feel everything clicking together. Then I have a rough day and all the lessons learned take a leap out of my mind.

Here’s an interesting historical fact about the book Mediations - it was never meant to be published. Marcus Aurelius left instructions for it to be burned when he died. Thankfully, someone in his entourage disregarded his wishes and preserved the text. Otherwise, we would not have his words to consider today.

Think on that fact for a moment. When Marcus Aurelius writes, “You don’t love yourself enough;” he is writing to himself! The Emperor of Rome! The wealthiest, most powerful person in the known western world is having a crisis of belief in himself. He wrote this down in a private journal because he had no peer to speak with. He was, by virtue of his position, the most isolated person in the entire empire. Anyone who he talked with either wanted something or had some complaint. He had no one to talk to except the blank pages of his journal, and he writes of his awareness that he does not value his own nature enough. Remarkable.

Even if you do not live with a mental illness like depression, I’m willing to bet that you don’t value yourself as much as others do. It is such a strange consequence of being human: that we constantly talk down to ourselves while simultaneously building up others. Why are we more inclined to encourage someone else rather than ourselves? I think it may be due to our evolution as social creatures requiring cooperation. Our ancestors would have been better served by connecting with and building up their fellows, instead of relying just on themselves.

Today, we live in an individualistic society, which I feel directly contradicts how we grew as a species. Maybe this is why all the lessons of Meditations can be summed up with the statement: try to help people as best as you can. We developed to cooperate with our fellow humans; we need their encouragement, but in our increasingly isolated, yet connected, world, we need to develop a more refined ability to encourage ourselves. To practice this, consider the following exercise:

Imagine that the 10-year-old version of you is sitting across from you. What would you say to yourself at that age? Would you say that they’re worthless? That they’re no good? That they can’t do anything right?

No!

You would encourage. You would tell them that they can do anything with enough hard work and persistence. You would expand, not limit, what the 10-year-old you feels is possible, and you would give them the inspiration to go for whatever it is they are passionate about.

That’s where I’m starting. Visualizing my younger self, and giving that version of me all the encouragement in the world. Perhaps with enough practice I’ll be more inclined to encourage myself as I am now.