Epictetus, The Handbook 17: Not the Event, but the Judgment . . .

When you see a man shedding tears in sorrow for a child abroad or dead, or for loss of property, beware that you are not carried away by the impression that it is outward ills that make him miserable.

Keep this thought by you: 'What distresses him is not the event, for that does not distress another, but his judgment on the event.'

Therefore do not hesitate to sympathize with him so far as words go, and if it so chance, even to groan with him; but take heed that you do not also groan in your inner being.

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 16 (tr Matheson)

I don’t do well during the holidays, not because I am by choice a curmudgeon, but because I am by condition subject to the Black Dog. I need to consciously prepare myself for the waves of pain, and learn to use my judgment to face my feelings.

As a child and younger man, holidays were full of joy, even magic. Now, Christmas just reminds me of a lost son, who passed right before. Halloween reminds of my lost love, just because her birthday fell at the same time. Easter reminds me of my Nana, to whom I never got to say goodbye.

Now I could moan and squirm, or I could try to wish it all away, and I’ve done that too many times. That’s what Thanksgiving used to be for. Or I could rethink the whole situation. I have now learned, over the years, that pain cannot simply be ignored. But it can be managed, and it can be transformed into healing. I can learn to take the responsibility to make the wrong things right, both for myself and for others.

I don’t usually control such feelings, but I can determine how I can think about them, and what I can do with them. Nothing that ever happened to me was ever in itself right or wrong, but how I estimate its meaning and importance is absolutely everything that will make it right or wrong for me.

How many times have I listened to someone’s life crushing experience, or he has listened to mine, and while we can understand the loss, we simply cannot empathize? This isn’t because it doesn’t matter, but rather because different things mean very different things to each of us. I can learn to respect that in someone else, even if I have not lived it as he has.

If I understand the source of distress, I can be prepared to meet it. Repression never works, since the force will simply go elsewhere, like all those times we yell at the kindest person at work because a spouse was heartless.

Instead, I can learn to mold it, to shape it, to rebuild it into something of use, to make joy out of pain, to make love out of hate. Pain has a certain emotional energy to it, one I imagine we all recognize. I can in my mind’s eye take that energy and harness it for the sake of something else, something that will bring contentment over misery.

This is hardly abstract metaphysics. It’s about hard practice. I have never told the story to anyone, but I once ruined yet another Thanksgiving for my family by running off to feel sorry for myself. I emptied my bank account to go on a good bender, the best one yet. Stumbling to my next watering hole, I ran across a woman crying on a park bench. She wasn’t young or pretty, but I was drawn to her. We chatted in the wind and the snow, and I learned that she had the exact same intentions I had, to wash away memories.

I honestly do not recall what I was thinking, but I called a cab, took her to the Star Market that hangs over the highway in Newtonville, and I did what I could to buy her the equivalent of a Thanksgiving meal. We took the cab back to her home in Watertown, and I made sure her family took care of her and the grocery bags.

No, it doesn’t end like a Frank Capra film. Her burly and tattooed son invited me in, in a very kind way, but I barked some dismissive comment. I went straight back to being rude, selfish, and downright miserable.

Yet that moment has stayed with me for many years. I have long forgotten her name, and I have no idea who that family was, but what I do recall is that small moment, however brief, in between one self-loathing and another, where I just took how poorly I felt and tried my best to turn it into something right.

Distress never needs to deny us the opportunity to love and to be happy. It can actually give us even more of an opportunity to love and to be happy. I hope to do it better the next time. 

Written in 7/2004