Meditations 10:7

The whole is compounded by nature of individual parts, whose destruction is inevitable ("destruction" here meaning transformation). If the process is harmful to the parts and unavoidable, then it's hard to see how the whole can run smoothly, with parts of it passing from one state to another, all of them built only to be destroyed in different ways. Does nature set out to cause its own components harm, and make them vulnerable to it—indeed, predestined to it? Or is it oblivious to what goes on? Neither one seems very plausible.

But suppose we throw out "nature" and explain these things through inherent properties. It would still be absurd to say that the individual things in the world are inherently prone to change, and at the same time be astonished at it or complain—on the grounds that it was happening "contrary to nature." And least of all when things return to the state from which they came. Because our elements are either simply dispersed, or are subject to a kind of gravitation—the solid portions being pulled toward earth, and what is ethereal drawn into the air, until they're absorbed into the universal logos—which is subject to periodic conflagrations, or renewed through continual change.

And don't imagine either that those elements—the solid ones and the ethereal—are with us from our birth. Their influx took place yesterday, or the day before—from the food we ate, the air we breathed.

And that's what changes—not the person your mother gave birth to.

—But if you're inextricably linked to it through your sense of individuality?

That's not what we're talking about here.