Genre and place in the book. A brief maxim-rule continuing the active temper of Book V (cf. 05-01): hold to your task under any external condition. In structure it is a chain of "indifferents" crowned by an imperative of action. The principal discipline is action (to do what is "fitting," to "dispose" the present well); the sustaining one is desire (indifference to what is not up to us).

"Do not be concerned" (Μὴ διαφέρου). The opening verb sets the posture of indifference: let it be all one to you whether you do what you ought shivering with cold or languid with heat, drowsy or well-slept, ill-spoken of or praised. All these are τὰ ἀδιάφορα, "indifferents": warmth and cold, sleep, reputation do not belong to the good and so must not move the mind from its work. Behind the posture stands the doctrine: DOGMAto act well, virtue alone suffices, and the external can neither add to it nor take from it. (The word ἀδιάφορα is not in the text — Marcus voices the doctrine through the verb διαφέρομαι.)

The fitting (τὸ πρέπον). The constant amid the variables is "doing what is fitting" (τὸ πρέπον ποιεῖς). Τὸ πρέπον, "the becoming," "the seemly," is a close cousin of καθῆκον (the appropriate act); both Rogovin and Long render it "duty." The point: circumstances change (cold, sleep, slander), but the demand on the act does not — it is fixed by the nature of the task, not by the state of the agent.

Death as an act of life. The climax is a sharp turn: the last member of the series, "whether dying or doing something else," Marcus glosses so that death turns out to be one of the acts of life (μία τῶν βιωτικῶν πράξεων), "the act by which we die." Dying is demoted in rank: not a cosmic terror or a special event, but one more act in the run of life's tasks — no different from enduring cold or answering slander. This is EXERCISEthe memory of death in a distinctive, active key: not "prepare for the end" but "die well, as you do every act well." Cf. Med. 9.3 (death is among the things nature wills) and 2.5 (every act as if the last).

To dispose the present well (τὸ παρὸν εὖ θέσθαι). The resolving formula: "here too it is enough to dispose the TERMpresent well." Τὸ παρόν is what is "at hand," the present moment and the present task; εὖ θέσθαι is "to set well, to manage." Even in dying the rule is the same as in every act: do well what is now before you. Thus the discipline of the present meets the discipline of action — cf. 03-12 (work at what is before you, satisfied with the present activity according to nature) and the metaphysics that "only the present is ours" (02-14).

Disciplines and parallels. The principal one is action (τὸ πρέπον, εὖ θέσθαι τὸ παρόν); the secondary is desire (indifference to the external). Parallels: 2.5 (every act as if the last); 03-12 (the present activity according to nature); 9.3 (death as the will of nature); the doctrine of the indifferents and DOGMAthe sufficiency of virtue (LS 63); the teaching on τὰ ἀδιάφορα.