Placeholder draft — replace with the real essay.
Same chair, same fifteen minutes, same battered translation, before the laptop is even open. A week of this and the difference isn’t some dramatic shift in outlook — it’s smaller and more useful than that.
What a week actually changes
Mostly the order of operations. The first hard thing of the day used to be whatever landed in the inbox first. Now the first hard thing is choosing, on purpose, what deserves the first fifteen minutes of attention — and it’s rarely email.
Marcus wrote Meditations for an audience of one. Reading it before the inbox opens is the closest I can get to borrowing that same audience of one, just for a little while, before the day insists on other people’s priorities.