Ἐφ’ ἃ διαταράττῃ τῇ ὁρμῇ ἢ φυγῇ, οὐκ ἔρχεται πρὸς σέ, ἀλλὰ σύ πως βαδίζεις ἐπ’ αὐτά· ἡ κρίσις οὖν σου περὶ αὐτῶν ἠρεμείτω, κἀκεῖνα ἡσυχάσει, καὶ οὔτε διώκων οὔτε φεύγων ὀφθήσῃ.
“It’s the pursuit of these things, and your attempts to avoid them, that leave you in such turmoil. And yet they aren’t seeking you out; you are the one seeking them. Suspend judgment about them. And at once they will lie still, and you will be freed from fleeing and pursuing.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.11 (tr. Gregory Hays)
Marcus Aurelius wrote these words to himself — not for publication, not for posterity. They were private notes scratched out in Koine Greek, probably in a military tent somewhere along the Danube frontier, by a man who happened to also be the most powerful person on earth. He called the work Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν — Things Unto Himself. A journal. A mirror. A set of reminders for a man who kept forgetting what he already knew.
Nearly two thousand years later, the reminder still lands.
I came to this passage — as many modern readers do — through Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic, a book that has become something of a quiet daily ritual for me. Holiday has spent years doing the hard work of making ancient Stoic philosophy accessible to people living ordinary, complicated, modern lives. Each entry in The Daily Stoic pairs a short passage from Marcus, Seneca, or Epictetus with a reflection on how it applies today. It’s deceptively simple — and genuinely transformative if you stay with it.
What Holiday understood, and what made The Daily Stoic resonate with so many people, is that these ideas aren’t museum pieces. Marcus wasn’t writing for scholars. He was writing for himself — trying to stay sane and grounded under impossible pressure. That’s not a historical curiosity. That’s Tuesday.
The Problem He Was Naming
Read that passage again slowly. He isn’t talking about the world coming at you. He’s pointing out something much more uncomfortable: you are going to it.
The email you haven’t opened yet — you’ve already written the response in your head twelve times. The conversation you’re dreading — you’ve rehearsed both sides of it for three days. The outcome you can’t control — you’ve been mentally rehearsing the worst version of it since Tuesday.
None of those things have arrived at your door. You walked to theirs.
This is the trap Marcus is describing. We tend to think of anxiety and turmoil as things that happen to us — external forces that find us, invade our peace, and won’t let go. But more often, we are the ones making the trip. We seek out the worry. We volunteer for the mental chase. We generate the noise ourselves and then wonder why it’s so loud.
What “Suspend Judgment” Actually Means
The hinge of this passage is a single word in the original Greek: κρίσις (krisis) — judgment. Marcus says: let your judgment about these things be still. And everything else will follow.
That word is worth sitting with. He isn’t saying don’t care. He isn’t telling you to become indifferent or detached from life. He isn’t advocating for numbness.
He’s saying: stop rendering verdicts on things that haven’t happened yet.
Every anxious thought about a future event is a premature judgment. You’ve decided it will be bad, that you won’t handle it well, that it will end a certain way. You haven’t seen the case — you’ve already handed down the sentence. And then you’re surprised to find yourself living inside that sentence.
Suspending judgment means holding the outcome loosely. It means acknowledging that you don’t actually know how this will go. It means letting a thing be undecided until it has to be decided.
This isn’t passive. It’s one of the harder disciplines there is.
We Live in a Culture That Rewards the Chase
Here’s why this is so hard for us right now, in ways that even Marcus couldn’t have imagined.
We live in an environment engineered to keep us pursuing and fleeing. Our phones are optimized to spike urgency. Social media rewards outrage and anxiety — because an anxious person keeps scrolling, clicking, reacting. Every notification is a little tap on the shoulder saying something is happening, you need to respond, don’t fall behind.
The turmoil Marcus describes as a personal failing has been turned into a business model.
And because we’re wired to look for threats — a survival instinct that served our ancestors well on the actual Danube frontier — we’re easily recruited into the chase. We pursue validation, followers, outcomes, approval. We flee failure, embarrassment, conflict, uncertainty. And we do most of this mentally, long before any of it is real.
We’ve convinced ourselves that the churning is productivity. That worrying is the same as preparing. That staying in a state of reactive tension is somehow responsible.
It isn’t. It’s exhausting. And it’s optional.
You Don’t Have to Be the Chaos
This is the line that stays with me in this passage: they aren’t seeking you out; you are the one seeking them.
There’s a quiet mercy in that. Because if you’re the one doing the seeking — even if you’ve been doing it unconsciously — then you’re also the one who can stop.
You don’t have to chase the catastrophic outcome down the mental hallway. You can stop walking. You can close the door. Not through force of will or white-knuckled suppression, but through the simple act of not rendering judgment on a thing that doesn’t require one right now.
The Stoics called this ἀταραξία — ataraxia — a kind of undisturbed tranquility. Not the absence of challenge, but the absence of unnecessary self-generated noise around it. You can face hard things. You can engage fully with the world. You can act with intention and care. And you can do all of that without manufacturing a crisis about it first.
Calm is not the absence of a life worth living. It’s the ground from which you can actually live it.
A Practical Pause
The next time you feel the familiar pull of turmoil — before you follow it — ask yourself one question:
Did this come to me, or am I going to it?
If you’re honest, more often than not, you’ll find you’ve been the one doing the traveling. And in that moment, you have a choice Marcus had to remind himself of constantly, in tent after tent, campaign after campaign:
You can put down the judgment. You can let the thing be still. You can choose not to be the chaos.
He found it difficult too. That’s why he kept writing it down.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.11. Original Greek text (Koine, written c. 170–180 AD). Translation by Gregory Hays, Modern Library, 2003. Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman, The Daily Stoic, Portfolio/Penguin, 2016.