The things that happen to us
Today I want to reflect on the following quote from The Meditations:
Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.
I don't know if everything is already fated. But for me this passage emphasizes the fact that there's so much in life we can't control. In the end we must practice acceptance. Not an easy thing to do, and I'm pretty sure even Marcus struggled with this. Why else would he write this entry and so many others like it?
Marcus is reminding himself here that the bad (and the good) has been waiting to happen to us since the very beginning. It's just the Big Bang doing its thing. Alan Watts says that the Big Bang is still happening, and we're it.
Articles
Personal notes I've written over the years.
- When does the Binomial become approximately Normal
- Gambler's ruin problem
- The t-distribution becomes Normal as n increases
- Marcus Aurelius on death
- Proof of the Central Limit Theorem
- Proof of the Strong Law of Large Numbers
- Deriving Multiple Linear Regression
- Safety stock formula derivation
- Derivation of the Normal Distribution
- Comparing means of Normal populations
- Concentrate like a Roman
- How to read a Regression summary in R
- Notes on Expected Value
- How to read an ANOVA summary in R
- The time I lost faith in Expected Value
- Notes on Weighted Linear Regression
- How information can update Conditional Probability
- Coupon collecting singeltons with equal probability
- Coupon collecting with n pulls and different probabilities
- Coupon collecting with different probabilities
- Coupon collecting with equal probability
- Adding Independent Normals Is Normal
- The value of fame during and after life
- Notes on the Beta Distribution
- Notes on the Gamma distribution
- Notes on Conditioning
- Notes on Independence
- A part of society
- Conditional Expectation and Prediction
- Notes on Covariance
- Deriving Simple Linear Regression
- Nature of the body
- Set Theory Basics
- Polynomial Regression
- The Negative Hyper Geometric RV
- Notes on the MVN
- Deriving the Cauchy density function
- Exponential and Geometric relationship
- Joint Distribution of Functions of RVs
- Order Statistics
- The Sample Mean and Sample Variance
- Probability that one RV is greater than another
- St Petersburg Paradox
- Drunk guy by a cliff
- The things that happen to us