If
you take away your opinion about that which appears to give you pain, you
yourself stand in perfect security.
“Who
is this self?”
The
reason.
“But
I am not reason.”
Be
it so. Let then the reason itself not trouble itself. But if any other part of you
suffers, let it have its own opinion about itself.
—Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8 (tr
Long)
When I wake in
the morning, I will often feel intense emotional pain. I open my eyes, and I
immediately feel flooded by a deep sense of loss. I do not choose the pain as
it comes over me.
When I wake in
the morning, I will also often feel intense physical pain. I open my eyes, and I
am immediately grabbed by sharp stabbing in my chest. I do not choose that
pain either as it comes over me.
If I did not
have recourse to my own Stoic attitude, I am fairly certain either one of these
circumstances alone would take me down. Both together would be completely unbearable.
Yet as it stands, even if I cannot make the pain disappear in either my
emotions or my body, I can choose what I am going to make of it in my thinking.
This ability
not only allows me to live, but also, more often than not, for my life to be
something more than clinging to the edge. The best way for me to describe it is
learning to put pain in its place. This means not allowing it to take over, but
it also means not being so foolish as to pretend it doesn’t exist. By all
means, let pain act upon all the parts of me that are not reason, but at the
same time let the part that is reason, the ruling part, understand that nothing
must impose upon it if I do not permit it to do so.
The power of
judgment is such that I can decide what anything means to me, and so I can
determine how deeply I will allow myself to be affected by this or that
feeling. I don’t think of this as a denial, but more as a sort of bracketing. I
can have a healthy respect, knowing what something can do to my flesh and
emotions, but I also can know I do not have to let it go any further than that.
In the simplest
of terms, a pain within the body does not need to become a despair within the
mind. The mind, through its distinct nature, can rise above this.
I would be a
fool to say that I am just the sum of my emotions, and it is sadly that sort of
approach that would allow me to go under whenever something hurts. Yet I would
also be a fool to say that I am just a mind, denying the reality of all my
other aspects. Accept each for what it is, but do not allow one to intrude upon
the proper place of the other.
The power of
the mind to have its judgment of “yes” or “no” to be absolute over itself is
quite an amazing thing. It doesn’t proceed from brute strength, or
extraordinary willpower, or violent conflict, but rather from just knowing that
there is something within me that is always completely invulnerable to anything
out there. Because mind rules itself, it rules what it permits into itself.
The pain may be
there, but it does not have to be here. I will sometimes repeat a silly little
phrase to myself, that a broken heart, whether literally or figuratively,
doesn’t need to also be a broken head.
Written in 10/2016
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