We cry to God Almighty, how can we escape this agony? Fool, don’t you have hands? Or could it be God forgot to give you a pair? Sit and pray your nose doesn’t run! Or, rather just wipe your nose and stop seeking a scapegoat.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.16.13.
As we get older, failure is not so inconsequential anymore. What’s at stake is not some arbitrary grade or intramural sports trophy, but the quality of your life and your ability to deal with the world around you. Don’t let that intimidate you, though. You have the best teachers in the world: the wisest philosophers who ever lived. And not only are you capable, the professor is asking for something very simple: just begin the work. The rest follows.
We should cherish the body with the greatest care,” Seneca said. Same goes for our profession, our standing, the life we have built for ourselves. “We should also be prepared, when reason, self-respect, and duty demand the sacrifice, to deliver it even to the flames.
If you think it’s simply enough to take advantage of the opportunities that arise in your life, you will fall short of greatness. Anyone sentient can do that. What you must do is learn how to press forward precisely when everyone around you sees disaster.
It teaches you how to get unstuck, unfucked, and unleashed.
The same is true for ego. You would be stunned at what kind of damage dust and dirt can do over time. And how quickly it accumulates and becomes utterly unmanageable.
This is important enough that it bears repeating: a wise person knows what’s inside their circle of control and what is outside of it.
But can you be fully content with your life, can you bravely face what life has in store from one day to the next, can you bounce back from every kind of adversity without losing a step, can you be a source of strength and inspiration to others around you? That’s Stoic joy – the joy that comes from purpose, excellence, and duty. It’s a serious thing – far more serious than a smile or a chipper voice.
You’ve got just one thing to manage: your choices, your will, your mind. So mind it.
External things can’t fix internal issues.
Whatever you’re going through, there is wisdom from the stoics that can help. In fact, in many cases, they have addressed it explicitly in terms that feel shockingly modern.
One cannot argue whether Hughes was gifted, visionary, and brilliant. He just was. Literally a mechanical genius, he was also one of the best and bravest pilots in the pioneer days of aviation. And as a businessman and filmmaker he had the ability to predict wide, sweeping changes that came to transform not just the industries he was involved in, but America itself.
Be natural and yourself and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day.
At any moment we may be toppled from our perch and made to do with less – less money, less recognition, less access, less resources. Even the “less-es” that come with age: less mobility, less energy, less freedom. But we can prepare for that, in some way, by familiarizing ourselves with what that might feel like.
It doesn’t solve the problems that people without it seem to think it will. In fact, no material possession will. External things can’t fix internal issues.
Hope is the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson said. It perches on our soul. It guides us through the storm. It keeps us warm. She also says it doesn’t ask anything of us.
There are two ways to be wealthy: to get everything you want, or to want everything you have... the same goes for freedom. If you chafe and fight and struggle for more, you will never be free. If you could find and focus on the pockets of freedom you already have, well, then you’d be free right here, right now.
Remember: Leaders are dealers in hope. Nobody wants to live in a world without a tomorrow, without a reason to continue, without some dot on the horizon they’re aiming at. And if we want that, we’re going to have to make it. For them and for ourselves, heroically.
The task of a philosopher: we should bring our will into harmony with whatever happens, so that nothing happens against our will, and nothing that we wish for fails to happen.′ -Epictetus. A long ‘to-do’ list seems intimidating and burdensome... but a ‘get-to-do’ list sounds like a privilege... Today, don’t try to impose your will on the world; instead, see yourself as fortunate to receive and respond to the will in the world.
We want things to go perfectly, so we tell ourselves that we’ll get started once the conditions are right... it’d be better to focus on making do with how things actually are...