It’s good to have a motto to bring you back to center. For me, it’s either “Let it go,” or, another personal favorite: “Hold no opinion.” It’s similar to “let it go,” in that it reminds me not to cling to my thoughts. Obviously you would think of “hold no opinion” as relevant when you hear some news, or hear a piece of music, or meet someone new. Our minds automatically form opinions about those things, and in fact modern society encourages us to form opinions about literally everything.
But, essentially, an opinion comes down to a binary feeling: acceptance or rejection. It falls on a spectrum from radical acceptance to radical rejection and every point in between. When I remind myself to “hold no opinion,” I’m basically remembering to neither accept nor reject the object, thought, person, emotion, etc. It just is a thing in the world, and it would be a thing in the world whether or not I existed to experience it, and its own intrinsic value would remain the same either way.
Marcus Aurelius used to like to strip things down to their most fundamental, crude descriptions: Wine is fermented grapes. Poetry is words in a particular order. Stuff like that. Basically what he was doing was removing opinion from the matter so that he could see things as they really are. In his case, it was a way to remain rational and level-headed about a thing. For me, “hold no opinion” is just another way to let things go and not get caught up thinking about a thing at all.
The Vulcan Buddha 