Consider things in their granularity

Today you may be anxious or worried, but does that mean nothing is going right? That your life as a whole is a failure?

Imagine a song, a dance, a movie, an artist's work, a face. Now... Focus on a tiny part of the whole: a musical note, a body movement, a scene, a painting, a jaw. Don't they seem insignificant when you look at them individually? Don't they seem insufficient? But when you step back and look at them again as a whole, don't you see an elegant overall logic at work?

Look at your existence in the same way.

Don't judge your life by a tiny part of it, but by its whole. Your life is a series of moments. When you do this delineation exercise, dear to Marcus Aurelius, you relativize the importance of these units, which taken independently, cannot create a general sense of failure. Do this delimitation exercise. It'll also help you focus on the present moment, in the spirit of the lesson on physical definition we just saw.

See your life as a sequence of moments over which you have absolute control.

I leave you for today with the original text by Marcus Aurelius from which today's lesson is inspired:

“You will despise joyous song and the dance and the combat-at-arms if you disintegrate the tuneful phrase into every one of its notes,
and ask yourself about each whether you are its servant; for you will be ashamed. And so you will be if you do what corresponds in the case of the dance in respect of each movement or pose, and the same also in the case of the combat-at-arms. Generally then, excepting virtue and its effects, remember to have recourse to the several parts and by analysis to go on to despise them, and to apply the same process to life as a whole.” ¹