Let me add that men who are worth
anything not only easily manage well so far as the necessities of life are
concerned, when they are in exile, but often acquire great fortunes.
At any rate Odysseus, in worse
plight than any exile one may say, since he was alone and naked and
shipwrecked, when he arrived among strangers, the Phaeacians, was nevertheless
able to enrich himself abundantly.
And when Themistocles was
banished from home, going to people who were not only not friendly, but actual
enemies and barbarians, the Persians, he received a gift of three cities, Myus,
Magnesia, and Lampsacus, as a source of livelihood.
Dio of Syracuse too, deprived by
Dionysius the tyrant of all his possessions, when he was banished from his
country waxed so rich in exile that he raised a mercenary army, went with it to
Sicily, and freed the island of the tyrant.
Who, then, if he were in his
right mind, looking at these cases would still maintain that banishment is the
cause of want for all exiles?
Even if I understand that exile can never deny me
what I need, I should not assume that it must then deny me what I might prefer.
My self-reliance will always provide me peace of mind, and it may also provide
me with other opportunities I did not expect.
When Odysseus, shipwrecked and literally without a
stitch, met Nausicaa, did he expect to find such hospitality and generosity, to
be given great treasures and a fine ship to finally return him home to Ithaca? New
places and new faces, however strange and frightening, can sometimes bring
wealth and friendship, just as easily as they can bring poverty and loneliness.
Exile won’t necessarily make me rich, but it won’t
necessarily make me poor, either. A Stoic realism about the ways of Fortune is
swayed by neither a naïve optimism nor a morbid pessimism about circumstances,
and is prepared to gladly accept both more or less. It is, ultimately, only my
state of mind that will turn those circumstances into blessings or curses.
The Black Dog often tries to convince me that
everything will be lost, and that transformation is always characterized by
pain. An honest estimation of my experiences, however, tells me that this is
hardly the case; sometimes my situation will indeed fall, and yet sometimes it
will also rise. Whether I stayed safely at home or was cast among strangers
never changed the odds. What always seemed to matter more was whether I kept my
wits about me, and managed to put my values in order.
I am extremely careful about not claiming to
understand precisely how Providence will unfold, yet I can’t help but notice in
hindsight that whatever happened to me always seemed to have been put there for
a perfectly good reason. Things only ended poorly when I made poor judgments,
and even then, those very poor judgments became building blocks for future
improvement.
Yes, there have been moments where I received far
less than I wanted, but there were also moments where I received for more than
I wanted. In the big picture, I’m not sure Fortune has either smiled or frowned
on me; she has been indifferent, as I should also be when it comes to anything
beyond the content of my own character.
The greater lesson for me has always been to first work
on what I need, to improve the state of my soul and my virtues, and then to be completely
open about getting what I might want, the state of my body and my possessions.
There is no place for demanding a worldly profit or
loss, and there is no cause for expecting circumstances to be better or worse.
They are not “good” or “bad” by themselves in any event, as their worth comes
from their proper use. A state of exile does not alter the pattern of what I
should suppose will happen.
Written in 12/2016
IMAGE: Pieter Lastman, Odysseus and Nausicaa (1619)
No comments:
Post a Comment