how to be your own roman emperor.

So, I've been learning about stoicism and a fellow named Marcus Aurelius.

Why is it that most Roman philosophers and emperors had names ending in -us?

Was it a decree of some sort? Who knows. There must be a linguistic explanation.

Or, another reason, is that humans sometimes are stupid

and look for meaning in places where there simply isn't any.

Anyhow, back to the original point. Stoicism.

It is not the concept of not feeling anything, but rather about choosing the best box

in the attic of your mind in which

your emotions belong.

Instead of acting on impulse, one focuses on the facts,

on reacting to an event with courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom.

In being the most genuine version of yourself instead of fixating on what was,

on what could be.

There are several aspects based on the concept of memento mori.

Remember you will die.

Yet, despite these philosophies and Roman emperors and tips

and meditations and breathing exercises to take four seconds breathing it,

holding it in, and another four seconds breathing it out,

the reality is

I desperately want for so much, precisely because I know I will die soon.

Soon can be tomorrow, twenty, forty, fifty, one hundred and twelve years from now.

What I want is tangible, burning, nonsensical, a borderline teenage dream--

I want to throw this desk into the window, create a bridge of iridescent glass

I get to step on in my sudden escape,

and no matter how many bleeding scrapes will cut my feet,

I would grin and laugh knowing I am finally, at long last, free;

free to explore a place where I get to climb trees to the very top branches,

where I get to make my words matter to vastly honest, honestly vast audiences,

where I do not think about my lifetime of the past as if it was my present,

where we all want for naught, where we choose kindness above all,

where we are all doing what we love, to the point where we forget to eat

or drink

or sleep.

I want to skip along insomniac streets with the sound of yellow-white

lamppost light and music in my ears,

to stare at the sunrise from a beach with tears in my eyes as I just

allow myself to simply

Be.