There is a clock running on your ability to think clearly. Marcus Aurelius knew it. He wrote about it in Meditation II.4 with an urgency that stands out even in a book full of urgency.
A limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go, and thou wilt go, and it will never return.
It will go. Thou wilt go. And it will never return.
Three clauses. Each one a degree worse than the last.
The question Marcus is asking himself is: are you using the time you have to think clearly, or are you spending it on everything except that?
John Locke and the Blank Slate
John Locke, writing in the 17th century, proposed that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa — a blank slate. A blackboard with nothing on it.
Then people start writing on it.
Your parents write on it. Your teachers. Your friends. The culture you grow up in. The experiences you have, especially the early ones. By the time you’re an adult, your blackboard is covered. Full of beliefs, assumptions, conclusions, fears, preferences — most of which arrived before you were old enough to evaluate them.
The critical point is this: most of what’s written on your blackboard was written by someone else.
You didn’t choose most of it. It was written on you while you were busy becoming a person.
What Marcus Is Asking You to Do
When he writes about ‘clearing away the clouds from thy mind,’ he’s not describing a meditation technique or a morning ritual. He’s describing an act of being honest with yourself.
Go back to the blackboard. Look at what’s written there. And for each thing, ask the question: is this actually true? Or did someone write it on me when I was too young, too trusting, too distracted, or too afraid to examine it?
Some of what’s there will survive the examination. Some of it won’t. The goal isn’t to erase everything — that’s not possible and wouldn’t be useful (except when you read classical literature with Jimmy to appreciate and understand what we’re reading together). The goal is to know the difference between what you’ve chosen and what was chosen for you. That’s the benefit of reading classical literature with me: we let the story write on our blackboards for the moment. Like now, with Marcus.
Marcus calls what’s written on your blackboard ‘clouds.’ Not facts. Clouds. Things that obscure your view of what’s actually there. Those are the same clouds that appear when you read classical literature, and the same ones I tell you to put aside to “get into” the story.
Why the Clock Matters
The urgency in Meditation II.4 is not an accident. Marcus was writing this in his fifties, on military campaigns, fighting wars that had already gone on for years. He was not a young man with unlimited time to get his thinking straight. He was a man who had watched people around him die without ever doing the cloud clearing.
The limit of time he’s describing isn’t just death. It’s the narrowing of capacity — the way habits form and become “normal,” the way beliefs become harder to examine the longer you’ve held them, the way what you think you think you really think is yours if you don’t challenge that thinking regularly.
You don’t have to wait until your fifties to recognize this. The blackboard doesn’t get easier to read as you get older. It gets harder.
The Practical Form of the Question
Jimmy’s version of this examination is simple: take one belief you hold with confidence and ask where did that come from? Not where you think it came from. Actually trace it. You heard of Ancestry – tracing your roots as far back as you can? This is tracing your belief as far back as you can.
For example, did you arrive at it through your own observation and reasoning? Or did someone put it on your blackboard — a parent, a teacher, a peer group, a culture — and you absorbed it without ever putting it to the test?
Most of the time, if you’re honest, the answer is someone put it there.
That’s not wrong. That’s actually how human beings develop throughout their life. We are exposed to all sorts of things that are trying to be written on our blackboards.
Until we stop and ask: where is this coming from? We use our own reasoning to challenge the belief, the habit, the feeling.
Marcus’s point is that doing the work of tracing it, testing it, deciding whether to keep it or clear it is what the time you have is for.
The clock is running. The blackboard is full. What are you going to do about it?
Read the Meditations with Jimmy at readingwithjimmy.com. Questions and reactions to [email protected].