A Way To Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously

The line from St. Augustine was inter feces et urinam nascimur—we are are born between piss and shit. Biologically, he’s correct. As a philosophical observation, he’s even more correct: Considering where we come from, it’s best not to take ourselves too seriously.

We find similarly graphic reminders in Marcus Aurelius’s writings. Even as he held incredible power, even as he regularly watched men and women prostrate themselves in his honor, he made sure to remind himself that his body was nothing more than "rotting meat in a bag." "Despise your flesh," he wrote, for it is only a "mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins and arteries."

In short, that he was nothing special. Just a man, a fragile, ordinary human born between shit and piss. As are all of us.