When you first rise in the morning tell yourself: I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous and cranks. They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don’t know the difference between good and evil. Because I have understood the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, I know that these wrong-doers are still akin to me … and that none can do me harm, or implicate me in ugliness—nor can I be angry at my relatives or hate them. For we are made for cooperation.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.1
You can be certain as clockwork that at some point today you’re going to interact with someone who seems like a jerk (as we all have been). The question is: Are you going to be ready for it?
This exercise calls to mind a joke from the eighteenth-century writer and witticist Nicolas Chamfort, who remarked that if you “swallow a toad every morning,” you’ll be fortified against anything else disgusting that might happen the rest of the day. Might it not be better to understand up front—right when you wake up—that other people often behave in selfish or ignorant ways (the toad) than it is to nibble it is to nibble it throughout the day?
But there is a second part to this, just as there is a second half of Marcus‘s quote: “No one can implicate me in ugliness—nor can I be angry at my relative or hate him.” The point of this preparation is not to write off everyone in advance. It’s that, maybe, because you’ve prepared for it, you’ll be able to act with patience, forgiveness, and understanding.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman