Three lenses. One question.

Shrink any trouble by viewing it from the scale of the whole earth and all time.

rehearse at dawn that you will meet the meddling, the ungrateful, and the arrogant — and that they act from ignorance of good and evil, so their behavior cannot injure your character

Urgency, celebrity, the roar of the present moment.

Taken alone it can license detachment from present duties — Marcus always pairs it with a return to the task at hand.

Whatever can happen, imagine in full detail before it happens, so that when it comes it arrives already familiar.

set aside a deliberate hour, picture the loss in full and concrete detail, and note what you would still have afterwards — strangeness is what makes calamity heavy, so remove the strangeness first

The comforting assumption that anything held is held securely.

Rehearsal can slide into the very brooding it was meant to cure; done badly it manufactures the dread it was supposed to disarm.

Truth is approached by cross-examination: define the term, test it against cases, and let contradiction do the teaching.

halt the argument and ask for the definition, then test it against the humblest counterexamples: the cobbler, the horse, the sick man

Rhetorical polish, the speaker's reputation, the length of the speech, the number of people applauding it.

It demolishes without building: interlocutors leave knowing their answer fails, not what the true answer is — and some leave angry enough to vote for hemlock.