Why We All Need A Thank You Intro To Our Personal Life Story
What Marcus Aurelius and T.E. Lawrence taught me about viewing the world and valuing ourselves
There’s something special about old literature. It has a way of reminding you how informal our world has become and how it can move too fast. These old texts are beautiful in their way.
The artistic nature of the word composition shows us that humans didn’t always write in blog-verse or tweets. These old writers were artists of communication. Many of us have lost this skill, just like we’ve forgotten the archaic talent of handwriting.
But recently I noticed another skill we’ve forgotten in two very different old books: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (about 170AD) and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).
Both are journals of sorts. Meditations is Aurelius’ personal diary he carried with him during his reign as Roman Emperor. While Seven Pillars is Lawrence’s personal telling of his time as a British agent aiding the Arab revolt against the Turks in WWI.
While separated by about 2,000 years, both texts start out the same way.
The first book of Meditations is titled “Debts and Lessons,” and the entire section is one long acknowledgement dedicated to people who helped Aurelius become the man he was. Over seventeen names and groups are listed, stretching fifteen pages.
In the introduction of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence lists the names of forty-one other British soldiers and says, “My proper share was a minor one.” A spotlight was shone upon him just for his skills with a pen and it was “unfair to my British colleagues.”
While Aurelius was one of the most powerful people in the world, and Lawrence a famous national hero, both started their works naming the importance of others in their endeavors.
This was beyond the simple nicety of a thank you note — more of an act of personal reflection which gave the writers themselves a better clarity in their life. It doesn’t require celebrity status to perform either.
So, we can all create an intro to our personal life story and gain similar benefits, which all aren’t easy to see at first. This requires a bit of examination.
What We Gain By Having Our Own “Debts And Lessons” Intro
Obviously, we all don’t have the writing skills of Marcus Aurelius or T.E. Lawrence, but this isn’t necessary. Writing is thinking. Namely, that’s the point of listing out those who helped shape you into the person you are.
It makes you think of the person and the lessons they’ve taught you. Specifically, the practice accomplishes two things:
It teaches you gratitude for skills, ideas, and help you’ve been given by various people over the years (this is relatively easy to see.)
Forming this intro also helps you calculate the intricate pieces that make you what you are (this isn’t as easy to see without contemplation.) We’ll examine Aurelius and Lawrence a bit later and expand on this idea.
We’ll start with the easy part. According to the Mayo Clinic, gratitude can improve your mental and physical health:
“Studies have shown that feeling thankful can improve sleep, mood, and immunity. Gratitude can decrease depression, anxiety, difficulties with chronic pain and risk of disease. If a pill could do this, everyone would be taking it.”
Not to mention it also focuses our thoughts on others instead of ourselves in our narcissistic age of selfies and social media. This was well within Stoic practices.
One of the exercises Marcus Aurelius would practice was futurorum malorum præmeditatio, or negative visualization. In essence, you imagine a worst-case scenario where the things in your daily life (i.e., job, friends, family, home, or health) were suddenly gone.
This reminds us of the value of all the things we tend to take for granted by making them mentally disappear for a bit. As I mentioned, gratitude is straight forward and easy to see on many levels with some effort.
However, the second benefit of our intro is a bit more obscure but very valuable and timely in our present age.
Using Your Thank You Intro To See Value In What You Are
A recent Gallup survey found 29% of Americans have been diagnosed with depression at some point in their life, while about 18% are currently receiving treatment. While depression can manifest itself in many ways, feeling worthless can be one of its paralyzing symptoms.
But the thank you intro intuitively challenges the idea of someone being worthless.
Namely, why would your “debts and lesson” group have invested time in bettering you if you were truly worthless? Something was there, or they wouldn’t have bothered.
You also were luckily positioned to gather lessons from this group of beneficial people, which uniquely turned into the person reading this. One only has to look into the lives of Marcus Aurelius and T.E. Lawrence to see this played out.
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Despite Lawrence being known as a war hero, he doesn’t fit the mold. He initially wasn’t accepted into the army because he was too short. Lawrence was originally an archeologist, his travels across the Middle East and knowledge of Arabic got him accepted into British Intelligence.
As you read the Seven Pillars, it doesn’t come across as a dry military diary, more like a beautiful travel journal written by a poet with action, politics, drama, and regret. In fact, Winston Churchill stated it “ranks alongside the greatest books ever written in the English language.”
So, not only did Lawrence’s unique unsoldierly skills make him invaluable as an intelligence agent for the region, but his ability with a pen enabled him to capture the story in a way that made it an instant classic. Not bad for someone too short to join the army, huh?
It’s much the same for Marcus Aurelius. When you flip through Meditations, you get the impression he’d rather be sitting in a quiet room and reading a book instead of being an Emperor. So he doesn’t fit the mold either.
Marcus reveals in his thank you intro he was lucky enough to meet a revered Stoic philosopher named Junius Rusticus that instructed him how to “train and discipline” his character. Part of this training happened to be writing in his journal that became Meditations.
Marcus was also adopted and trained by the previous Emperor Antoninus Pius. The former ruler taught him compassion, “indifference to superficial honors,” and to ignore flattery.
In this case, it presented Rome with a ruler that wasn’t a megalomaniac in a time of great trials, such as a plague and civil war. The ideas here also give us something valuable for our present day.
Reviving A Lost Literary Art
While we’ve gained lots of speed and technical knowledge in our day and age, old literature demonstrates an art we’ve lost touch with — the thank you intro.
The act of personal reflection can give us a sense of gratitude for the things we have in life that we tend to take for granted. It’s also good for mental health that our quick times tend to strain.
Not only this, but the practice of listing the various people who helped form us and the lessons they’ve taught also lays out intricate pieces of what we are and the value we have. For a depressed populace, that’s needed more than ever.
This all goes into a valuable lesson Marcus Aurelius and T.E. Lawrence left us about viewing the world and valuing ourselves.
We all need a thank you intro to our personal life story.