When I read a book that resonates with me or that I get huge value from, I often come back to it and read the parts that I have underlined or marked. One of my books that has the most underlines is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius says that we have 3 relationships with:

• The body you inhabit
• The divine, the cause of everything in all things
• The people around you

As always we take from things what we need and we try to apply it to our own thinking. For me, I found it helpful to change these up without straying too much away from the original point. I find it helpful to think of the 3 relationships as:

• Relationship with the self
• Relationship with your purpose (whatever you believe that to be)
• Relationship with those around you

In a busy world where a lot of us feel like we’re moving 100 miles a minute I think it can be helpful sometimes to take a minute to reassess and examine where we’re at. Is this helpful or damaging to me, does this feed into my purpose and is this helpful or damaging to those around me?

If we can get really good at doing this, I think life might be a lot less turbulent. It sounds easy but this takes a lot of work. It takes self-awareness to know you need to check-in with yourself. It takes honesty to examine how you’re acting and why. Lastly, it takes patience to sit and think about how what we do can affect others.

It’s not easy, but it’s worth trying.