Between Vapor and Virtue
Hoan Kiem Lake, Hanoi, 2025
An overcast afternoon. I walked slowly after a long journey.
The air was cool, and the city felt quiet.
For the first time in a while, everything was calm.
I tried to find answers. I began by reading self-help books, and over time I turned toward philosophy and spirituality.
I traveled, seeking moments of solitude, hoping that clarity would emerge in silence.
When I read Ecclesiastes, I learned to see life as it truly is: fleeting, elusive, and beyond full understanding. The Hebrew word hevel, often translated as “vapor” or “breath,” captures the impermanent and mysterious nature of human existence. It taught me humility before life’s uncertainties and a quiet form of acceptance. Yet I began to wonder whether such acceptance, though peaceful, could lead to stillness without motion. It offered contentment, but not direction.
That question lingered until I came across a passage from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius:
If you work at what is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you should be bound to give it back immediately. If you hold to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with your present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which you utter, you will live happily. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.
This was the answer I had been searching for. It was not about understanding reality or surrendering to it, as Ecclesiastes had shown me. It was about how to live, and how to transform awareness into meaningful action.
Marcus Aurelius did not call for withdrawal, but for disciplined engagement with life. To him, happiness is not the absence of struggle but the harmony between reason, effort, and virtue. To live according to nature is to fulfill one’s role in the world with integrity and composure, whatever that role may be.
In many ways, this mirrors the moral teachings of religion: to act with faith, to serve, to embody values. Yet too often these ideals remain confined to words and rituals. Marcus asked for something deeper. He asked for embodiment, the quiet courage of living one’s values through consistent action.
Faith, in this sense, is not blind belief but disciplined trust: to act with reason, energy, and serenity even when outcomes are uncertain. When a person lives in this way, guided by virtue and detached from reward, nothing external can truly obstruct them.
There are three essential components to such a life:
To be guided by reason, so that choices are shaped by understanding rather than impulse.
To be fueled by passion, so that purpose is lived with vitality and courage.
To remain spiritually calm, a state cultivated through wisdom, restraint, and devotion to higher virtues.
To see life as vapor, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, is to recognize that everything passes.
To live as Marcus teaches is to act well within that vapor, to create meaning in the fleeting moment.
Perhaps the two are not opposites after all.
One teaches acceptance. The other teaches action.
Together, they form the rhythm of a life that is both grounded and alive:
to accept the vapor and to live with virtue within it.
