The Practice of Reflection
This week you will practice something the Stoics treated as a discipline, not a mood: looking back at your own life with honesty and without drama. Each day's passage gives you a slightly different lens, moving from simple self-questioning through the discipline of honest self-appraisal, the quiet celebration of real progress, the warning against living only forward, the full sweep of your relationships, the habit of reading other people's motives, and finally the question that makes all of it urgent: how does this moment stand in light of my mortality? By Saturday you will have a complete, practiced method for reflection that is yours to keep.
Passage
Accustom yourself in the case of whatever is done by any one, so far as possible to inquire within yourself: 'to what end does this man do this?' And begin with yourself and first examine yourself.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations X.37
Reflection
Marcus now turns reflection outward, toward other people's actions, and immediately turns it back inward. Before you ask why someone else does what they do, he says, begin with yourself. This is not a detour from the week's practice; it is its natural extension. When you examine your own motives honestly all week, you develop a more careful eye for the gap between surface behavior and underlying intention, in others as much as in yourself. The reflection that has been personal becomes a form of perception.
Go deeper
Think of someone whose behavior has recently irritated or puzzled you: when you applied Marcus's method and asked about their end before examining your own, what did you find about your own motive for paying attention to them in the first place?
Practice
The Motive Inquiry
Choose one action someone else took today or yesterday that you noticed and had some reaction to, however mild. Write down what you think their end or purpose was. Then, before you settle on that answer, write down what your own end was in noticing and interpreting their action. Spend at least half your time on the second question. Marcus's sequence is deliberate: examine yourself first, and let that inform how you read others.