“When he wrote Meditations, Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world. He had, quite literally, a whole empire at his disposal. Cities, armies, palaces. All were his. He spent over a decade, from the year 161 to 180, as Roman emperor during the 'Golden Age'. And yet he resisted seeking any contentment in his status and power, in favour of simplicity, consultation and a cosmic perspective. He believed watching the stars was important and talks about Pythagoras - the early Greek philosopher and founder of Pythagoreanism - as his influence here.
The Pythagoreans saw gazing up at the sky not just as a pleasant thing to do, but an insight into a divine order. Because stars are all separate, but all together in an order. For the Stoics, looking at them was looking at unveiled glimpses of divinity - and also fragments of Nature.
It is not just the sky or the stars, then, that are important, but what we think when we look at them. Our connection to the shifting world around and above us.
'The universe is change', wrote Marcus Aurelius. 'Our life is what our thoughts make it.'
Even a man in charge of an empire could look at the stars and feel happily small in the grand universal order of things.
The sky doesn't start above us. There is no starting point for sky. We live in the sky.”