Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.51

Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4 (tr Long)

The central tenet of Stoic ethics is that our happiness rests in our own actions, and that we never need to allow ourselves to be ruled by our circumstances. This is sometimes seen as a sort of inner toughness, though it hardly means that the Stoic does not love. It is also sometimes seen as a sort of indifference, though it hardly means that the Stoic does not care. They key lies in learning how to love, and what to care for.

The image of the cliff standing against the sea is, as they say, an oldie but a goodie. It can do much to remind us that we need never be cast down by what smashes into us, and that a fury without doesn’t have to lead to a fury within.

My own attempts at Stoic self-reliance were often less than satisfactory, and though all of us will develop our own patterns of thinking that help us through, I found that, in my case, I was falling short because I was misunderstanding the nature of strength.

I would look at something outside of me, something I felt hurt or threatened by, and I would be intimated by the power that it had. “How can I possibly be strong enough to defeat that?” In some cases it was someone with incredible influence, or a circumstance that would surely never budge, but most often it was about the force of feelings that seemed to flow off from horrifying events.

I would wince, shut my eyes, and expect the worst to hit me. I was convinced I needed to fight things off to be strong, though I was also convinced I didn’t have the strength to do the fighting. There seems little point in holding one’s hand up in defiance of a steamroller. My body was too weak, my resources were too meager, and my own will could hardly stand up to the will of so many others.

I was confronting the wrong enemy. I somehow assumed all of it meant controlling the sea, instead of just being a cliff. Let the water swirl around me as it wishes, but it is my own immovability that can make me strong. In the simplest of terms, it was never about conquering the ocean, but about conquering myself. The situation was not the problem. My own fear of the situation was the problem.

No, in most cases I am not at all strong enough to defeat someone else, or change the state of affairs, or determine events. Even the feelings that follow from events may not be subject to my conscious choice. They happen to me, like other things happen, which is why they are called passions, and not actions.

I always like to remind myself that analogies are inherently incomplete, but notice that the promontory doesn’t stop there from being any waves. By standing as it does, it redirects the waves around it. The taming is from being strong within myself, and by taming my own thoughts, I can then make myself strong in the face of whatever may come my way.

Written in 2/2006