We want things to go perfectly, so we tell ourselves that we’ll get started once the conditions are right, or once we have our bearings. When, really, it’d be better to focus on making do with how things actually are. Marcus reminded himself: “Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic.” He wasn’t expecting the world to be exactly the way he wanted it to be, but Marcus knew instinctively, as the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper would later write, that “he alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is.” Today, we won’t let our honest understanding of the
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