“Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.47
There is a particular kind of mental weight that accumulates without you noticing. Not the big things — the grief, the real problems, the actual crises. Those you can see coming. I mean the small stuff. The irritations that compound. The ambient noise of small frustrations, minor injustices, things that did not go the way they were supposed to. The dust.
Marcus had a name for it. And a prescription.
Look up.
He is not being poetic. He is being practical. The exercise he describes — imagining yourself running alongside the stars, contemplating the constant cycling of elements — is a deliberate reorientation of scale. You are not the center. The things that feel enormous right now are not enormous. They are small against the backdrop of what is actually moving.
I have found this works best physically. Get outside. Look at something far away. Stand somewhere that makes you feel appropriately small. The warehouse in the early morning before anyone else gets there. A stretch of road you can see for miles. A sky full of stars over Wayne National Forest on a clear night with no light pollution.
The dust does not disappear. But it settles.
The Psalms do this constantly. The writers zoom out — from personal anguish to the God who sits above the circle of the earth, from the immediate problem to the one who stretches out the heavens like a curtain. It is not escapism. It is calibration. Putting the thing in its actual place in the actual order of things.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place — what is man that you are mindful of him?” — Psalm 8:3-4
That is not a despairing question. It is a relieved one. The weight of being the center of everything lifts when you remember that you are not.