溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Do I Truly Love Those Closest to Me?
While professing to love humanity afar, do I truly love the person right beside me?
And love those you live with, truly.
Aurelius's "love those you live with" shows the distinctive Stoic view of love. The Stoics saw all humans as world-citizens linked by one reason, teaching a love for humanity as a whole (oikeiosis). But that universal love risked drifting into abstraction, and this line pulls it down to the concrete person nearby. Later thinkers carried the tension on as a question: which comes first, love for the distant many or love for the near few? Universal benevolence or particular attachment? The question still divides the heart that would embrace humanity from the heart that would guard the one beside it.
In an age that sends its heart easily to distant suffering while going numb to those nearby, the question of whether we truly love those we live with returns only more sharply.
An emperor ruling a vast realm gives himself a brief command: love those you live with, truly.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
An emperor ruling a vast realm gives himself a brief command: love those you live with, truly. He who weighed the welfare of the whole world turns his gaze to the people he faces each day. I find this line painfully precise. It is easy to love a distant ideal, hard to love the person we bump against up close. "I love humanity" can become an excuse that covers a heart unable to bear one person nearby. I too turn my eyes toward this question: do I truly love those closest to me?
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