Mindful Abiding

Derren Brown opens Book Seven of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations with the disappointment of holidays: you get to the white sand and find you brought yourself with you. Marcus's related point is the consoling one, that you'll bring your reason with you into the future too, so stop worrying about it now. From there Brown sets Stoicism beside mindfulness and offers the question he asks whenever he's troubled: do I have a problem right now? The answer, he says, has always been no. He also confesses to hating dinner parties.

The turn is Marcus's line about living each day as your last 'without a frenzy, without apathy and without pretense', which Brown takes apart phrase by phrase: the in-between moments with a partner, the tailors he wanted to hug after lockdown, and, via Kafka and Samuel Scheffler, why life needs to end, and other lives need to go on, for anything to mean much.