"Already now" — and who stands in the way. διὰ περιόδου — "by a circuit," the long way round; εὔχῃ — "you pray for." The book opens on the gap between praying and having: what you are reaching by a detour is available at once. And the obstacle is named in a single word — ἐὰν μὴ σαυτῷ φθονῇς, "if you do not envy yourself." Φθονέω does not mean "to be unkind" but to grudge, to refuse out of envy: a man stands between himself and his own good like a miser over goods not his. Neither Rogovin ("if only you will be well-disposed toward yourself") nor Long ("dost not refuse them to thyself") keeps the edge — in Marcus you are your own begrudger.

Three times, three different dispositions. The formula is extremely spare, and its verbs are not interchangeable: the past is to be left (καταλίπῃς), the future handed over to providence (ἐπιτρέψῃς τῇ TERMπρονοίᾳ), the present straightened (ἀπευθύνῃς — as one straightens what is bent). The past is not workable, the future is not your department, and only TERMthe present takes correction. Cf. 9.6, where the same division is folded into a triad: "the present opinion apprehending, the present act social, the present disposition content."

Piety and justice are the names of disciplines. The pair ὁσιότης / TERMδικαιοσύνη is decoded on the spot. Piety is loving what is allotted (DOGMAφιλεῖν τὸ ἀπονεμόμενον) — the discipline of desire; the same verb ἀπονέμω stands in 4.25 and 5.27. Justice is to speak the truth without wrapping (χωρὶς περιπλοκῆς — literally "without a winding round") and to act κατὰ νόμον καὶ TERMκατ’ ἀξίαν — the discipline of action; on apportionment "by worth" as nature's own work, 8.7. The same pair, more briefly, in 4.18: look only at what is your own, "that it may itself be δίκαιον καὶ ὅσιον."

An obstacle referred to another department. The list of hindrances — another's TERMκακία, another's TERMopinion, another's voice — closes on something unexpected: and the sensation of one's own body. And at once a referral: ὄψεται γὰρ τὸ πάσχον, "for the part that suffers will see to it." The body is neither denied nor despised — it is declared a separate authority with its own competence; cf. 7.16, where the σωμάτιον looks after its own not being hurt.

What exactly to fear. The close inverts the ordinary fear: not that you will one day cease to live, but that you have never begun to live according to nature. The three consequences that follow are all about the same thing — being at home in the world: you will cease to be a ξένος in your own native land (for Marcus the stranger is the man who does not know what happens in the cosmos, 4.29; cf. 12.13: "how ridiculous and what a stranger is he who is surprised at anything that happens in life"), you will cease to wonder at the daily as if it were unheard of, and you will cease to hang on this and that. κρεμάμενος is the image of a suspended weight, not of a marionette: the strings come later, in 12.19. The governing discipline is desire, the sustaining one action.