And if you choose to hold fast to what is right, do not be irked by difficult circumstances, but reflect on how many things have already happened to you in life in ways that you did not wish, and yet they have turned out for the best.
On a bad day, I find statements like this to be preachy and condescending, as if my troubles in life are somehow being described as not worth worrying about.
On a good day, I understand that all of those worries were entirely of my own making, and that there has never been a single circumstance that ever “made” me unhappy. I invariably allowed them to harm me, by not discovering how to put them to good use.
Certainly, situations have not always gone as I might have wanted, though that does not mean that I didn’t need them to go as they did. People have surely acted with carelessness or malice, but that was on them, and not on me.
This is not defeatism, and it is not letting myself be steamrolled. Quite the contrary, the trick is in taking a hold of what I ought to do, and then further seeing everything else that might happen as an opportunity to continue doing what I ought to do.
Only the Stoic Turn makes this possible, by shifting the weight from the external conditions to my own internal choices, by taking responsibility for my own character instead of letting events define me.
For the last few weeks, I have felt like the only worthwhile thing I can manage to do is to let Jack, the old tabby cat, in and out of the house whenever it suits his feline fancy, and to feed him whenever he meows plaintively. I sourly gripe to myself that no one else cares, that my whole existence has become a miserable failure.
And yet I have been showing care and affection to one of God’s creatures, have I not? A grandness of scale is not required to provide a sincerity of depth.
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