Day 17 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Marcus Aurelius didn’t always want to get out of bed.
He wrote about it.
Book 5 of the Meditations opens with him arguing with himself about why he should get up: “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work — as a human being.'”
He was emperor of Rome, writing to himself about why it was worth getting up in the morning.
That image is useful.
Not because Marcus was lazy.
He clearly wasn’t.
It shows the morning ritual for what it actually is: not a natural state, not effortless inspiration, not the automatic product of being a serious person.
It’s a practice.
Something you do deliberately, before the day gets hold of you.
The Stoic morning ritual has a specific structure, and Marcus is our best source for it.
Before engaging with the world (before meetings, decisions, interactions, demands), he would sit with the day ahead.
Not to plan it in the productivity-system sense.
To prepare himself for it.
The preparation had three elements.
First: expectation-setting.
Marcus would remind himself that the people he was about to deal with were going to be difficult. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.”
This sounds misanthropic.
It isn’t.
The point isn’t to anticipate people with contempt.
Marcus follows this immediately with the reminder that we are all made of the same stuff.
That these difficult people are also capable of reason and cooperation.
That getting angry at them is like getting angry at rocks for being hard.
The expectation-setting works as a tool against surprise: someone who expects friction is less derailed by friction than someone who expects everything to go smoothly.
Second: the identification of where he might be tested.
Not every day presented the same challenges.
Some days required courage, difficult conversations, unpopular decisions.
Some required patience.
Some required the ability to sit with uncertainty.
The morning was the time to think through what this particular day was likely to demand, and to remind himself of the resources he had available.
Third: the anchor.
A return to core principles:
the dichotomy of control,
the virtues,
the brevity of life,
the view from above.
Not a long recitation, just a brief, grounding reminder of what he was actually trying to do.
Epictetus had his own version.
He would begin each day with the simple question: what is mine today?
What is mine to control, mine to do, mine to be responsible for, and what isn’t?
Getting clear on that before the day began meant he was less likely to spend energy on the latter.
For vegans, the morning ritual offers something specific.
Vegan life is lived in a world that wasn’t built for it.
Most of the day’s encounters, food choices, product decisions, conversations, media, are structured around assumptions that conflict with your values.
The person who goes into that world without preparation goes in reactive.
Something happens, and they respond from wherever they happen to be emotionally that day.
Some days that’s fine.
Many days it isn’t.
The morning ritual changes the state you walk into the world from, not the world itself.
Ten minutes is enough.
Here’s the structure:
Sit, before you pick up your phone.
Before you check anything.
While the day is still quiet.
Then:
One: what might be difficult today?
Not a worry spiral.
A specific, realistic anticipation.
What conversations might be hard?
What decisions might require courage?
Where might your patience be tested?
Two: what is yours today, and what isn’t?
Of the things on your mind right now, which live inside your circle of control, and which live outside it?
Three: what do you want to remember today?
One principle, one value, one phrase from the tradition.
Something that anchors you to who you’re trying to be.
Then begin.
The phone can wait ten minutes.
Whatever arrived in your inbox overnight can wait ten minutes.
The world will be exactly as it was when you come back to it.
The difference is that you’ll come back to it from a settled place rather than a reactive one.
Marcus wrote the Meditations in the mornings, despite having no spare time, because he knew the first thing you put in your mind shapes everything that follows.
Practice for today
Set your alarm ten minutes earlier than usual.
Before you look at your phone, before anything else, sit and work through the three questions:
what might be difficult?
What is mine?
What do I want to remember?
Do this every morning for the rest of the series and notice what changes.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.