On looking back

Marcus Aurelius wrote his private notebooks while commanding armies on the empire's northern frontier, far from Rome, often ill and rarely at peace. Book IV returns again and again to a single discipline: the mind can withdraw into itself and steady its own footing, but only if it stops rehearsing what lies behind or racing toward what lies ahead. The trouble, he saw, was rarely the road. It was the constant turning of the head.

This week the live capture of the Broadway musical Hadestown arrived in North American cinemas for a brief run. The live theater capture of the hit Broadway musical is playing in cinemas across North America starting today, Friday, July 24, only through July 28. The show retells the myth of Orpheus, who is granted his wife's return on one condition: walk ahead and do not look back. He cannot bear the doubt, and turns. The old story names something Marcus knew. What undoes us is often not the task but our inability to trust the step we are already taking.