Somewhere on campaign, probably in a tent on the Danube frontier, Marcus Aurelius wrote a note to himself about wanting to be elsewhere. He was the emperor of Rome and he was tired. The Meditations, Book IV, passage 3, opens with a craving anyone would recognise: the wish to get away.
As Donald Robertson notes, “The private reflections recorded in the Meditations were never meant to be published, rather they were a source for Marcus’ own guidance and self-improvement.” A man reminding himself of something he keeps forgetting. The country house is not always there. The mind, in theory, always is.
In George Long’s classic translation, he writes, “Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much.” Then he turns the desire inward. “For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul,” he goes on.
What he does with the craving is the part that stays with me. The wish to be away from it all, somewhere other than here, the country house, the coast, he doesn’t treat as a problem you solve by booking better. He treats it as a tell. “But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men,” he writes, in the gap between those two lines, “for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.” The wanting-to-be-elsewhere is the ordinary thing. What it overlooks is that the elsewhere is already with you. You carry it through every airport and never have to declare it. You don’t need the seashore. The shore, such as it is, is internal, and it travels.
The retreat isn’t a place you go to escape thinking. It’s a place you go to order it.
“And I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind,” he writes in the same passage. Tranquillity is not an empty room. It’s a tidy one. That distinction is the whole thing.
My wife meditates, often, sometimes in the morning before the day has any shape to it, and I think it does for her what Marcus is describing. I have tried it more than once and it has never stuck. I sit, I count breaths, I notice my leg has gone to sleep, I notice I am thinking about email, I give up. What works for me is duller and more physical: long walks, and golf played alone with no one waiting on the tee. Somewhere in the rhythm of those, the laps slow down and the head sorts itself out a bit. I would not call it a practice, and I’d never claim it does what proper meditation does. But it’s the closest I get to retreating into my own mind on purpose rather than avoiding it at one in the morning.
I am not a psychologist or a therapist, and this is a piece of reading and reflection on an old text, not advice. The research on these things comes from particular groups of people at particular moments, not a settled rule about how every mind works.
The retreat, Marcus says, is always open. The harder question is whether any of us have done the ordering that would make it quiet once we got there, or whether we’d find the same noise waiting, only with nowhere left to drive to.
If your own version of the late-night laps is wearing you down more than it’s interesting to read about, a qualified counsellor or therapist is worth more than any old text or any blog post.
