StanceAttested · Marcus Aurelius
The present task
Perform each act of life as if it were the last.
set himself to perform each act with all the seriousness and he could muster, freed from yesterday's memory and tomorrow's worry. To hold this stance is to bring the mind back to the present task alone: neither scatter nor haste, but one thing at a time, done fully. You stop carrying at once all that was and all that will be, and the act gains in rightness what attention gives it.
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Enacts
- Temporal orientation · Living in the present
- Attention and diversion · Recollection
Source: Marcus Aurelius
Appears in
- Reclaiming attention — Faced with devices designed to capture it, can we really reclaim our attention by working at it, withdrawing, fasting from the feed, returning to the present, or do such techniques only paper over a trouble far larger than us?