At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed

Book Five opens with the morning line. "At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do?" Marcus needs to tell himself this in the morning. Even an emperor wants to stay in bed. The Stoic discipline is the daily decision to get up and do the work anyway.

The book then turns on the question of role. What is a human being for? The bee for honey, the eye for seeing, the foot for walking — and the human being for the kind of rational, social, virtuous activity human beings can do. To be a Stoic is to recognize the role one has been given (by nature, by birth, by the circumstances one finds oneself in) and play it well, without resenting it and without longing for someone else's. Marcus has the role of emperor; he did not choose it; it is his.

The book is also one of the most personal in the work. Marcus writes about his own irritability, his own slowness to forgive, his own susceptibility to praise. He reminds himself that the work is its own reward — "the prize of action is the action itself" — and that complaining about the work is unworthy of the worker. Get up. Do the work. The day is short, the work is long, and the work is what you are.