Epictetus, The Handbook 19: Quoth the Raven

When a raven croaks with evil omen, let not the impression carry you away, but straightway distinguish in your own mind and say, 'These portents mean nothing to me; but only to my bit of a body or my bit of property or name, or my children or my wife.

‘But for me all omens are favorable if I will, for, whatever the issue may be, it is in my power benefit from them.'

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 18 (tr Matheson)

The Ancients understood that what we call luck is merely our ignorance of causes, and that what we call good luck or bad luck is merely how we perceive a benefit or harm to us. The same could be said for fate, or destiny, or prophecy. Things are as they are, they will be as they will be, and the only difference to us will be what we will choose to make of those things.

I have long had a frustrating melancholic disposition, either imprinted in my nature or bred by nurture, to immediately see bad signs. My past will drag me down, my present will seem tenuous, and my future will appear empty.

This has made the practice of Stoicism all the more important to me, not just because I can begin to see some good in things, but because I can begin to see that all things, however they may at first seem, can be good for me if I but choose to understand them rightly. Stoicism rarely works in half measures.

This is true, first, because anything that can ever happen to me will only affect my circumstances, but nothing that can happen to me will determine my judgment, my will, and my own action. The core of my human identity remains intact, if I only so choose.

Second, my judgment and will can always choose to make something good of any condition, even if this means only doing anything good in the face of an evil.

This seems naïve to some, but I suggest this is only because we still assume, to some extent, that our circumstances make and define us. Even as I might instinctively see doom and gloom, I have had to accept, quite begrudgingly at first, that I was nothing more or less than what I made of myself.

This can actually be quite terrifying to face, since it means only I am accountable for myself, and I can no longer blame the world for what I perceive to be all the wrongs I thought I had suffered.

I am certain that this is not just a pleasant abstraction, because I have now been using this attitude to great benefit far more often than I can number. I have managed to transform a deepest betrayal into a commitment to trust, loneliness into self-reliance, poverty into a newfound assessment on the essentials of life, physical suffering into the practice of fortitude, hatred or indifference into countless opportunities to commit small acts of love.

I have reached a point, and will hopefully be able to continue along these lines, where as much as something may hurt or haunt me, I now no longer wish it had never happened, because I can no longer separate the progress I have made, however sparing and humble, from these experiences. I don’t really need fortune to spare or coddle me, whatever those impressions may at first be telling me.

When the raven croaks, I need not assume dark times are ahead. I can remember that I will lose little of significance, and I will gain another chance to think, choose, and act rightly, whatever the circumstance.

Written in 2/2009

Image: "The Twa Corbies", Arthur Rackham (1919)