Epictetus, Discourses 1.4.4

Show me your progress then in this field. You act as though when I was talking to an athlete and said, “Show me your shoulders”, he answered, “Look at my leaping-weights.” That is for you and your leaping-weights to look to; I want to see the final result of your leaping-weights.

 

“Take the treatise ‘On Impulse’ and learn how I have read it.”

 

Slave, that is not what I am looking for—I want to know what impulses you have, for action and against it, to know what you will to get and will to avoid; how you plan and purpose and prepare—whether in harmony with Nature, or out of harmony with Nature. 

 

Show me that you act in harmony with Nature, and I will tell you that you are making progress; act out of harmony with Nature, and I bid you begone and write books on such things and not merely expound them. 

 

What good, I ask, will they do you? Do you not know that the whole book is worth but five pence? Do you think then that the man who expounds it is worth more? Therefore, never seek your work in one place and progress in another.

 

I immediately think of the people I have known who spent thousands of dollars on a home gym, and then proceeded to show it off to guests as evidence that they were in peak physical condition. 

 

Or the scholars who pointed to their many peer-reviewed publications as proof that they were the best of teachers. 

 

Or, to consider myself, how often I have bought a shiny new book, never actually bothered to read it, but kept it on a shelf to give myself the false impression that I had the world figured out. 

 

Even when I did read those books, was I in any way making actual use of what I had learned, or was I going through the expected motions of merely looking learned? I once wasted an hour of my life, precious time I will never get back, arguing with someone about which English terms to use for the cardinal virtues, and in what order they should be listed. 

 

I can hear Epictetus in my head, telling me quite bluntly that the point of a virtue is that I practice it, not that I pontificate about it. The talking will only be as good as the doing. 

 

My standards are too often caught up in the external appearances instead of the internal disposition. A conformity to Nature is the measure of a good life, not whether anyone else can see me grandstanding. I tell myself that I know this, and yet I will still catch myself looking around, expecting to be rewarded with someone’s approval. 

 

Whenever I have managed to make some genuine progress in life, it is not at all in the ways that I might have expected. The things that mattered did not involve stately processions, trumpet fanfares, or raucous applause. In most every case, no one else even noticed them, and yet the consequences for me were profound. 

 

They were the little moments of insight, the weary struggle of simple acts of kindness, the willingness to leave behind nagging resentments, the power to turn away from creeping temptations. What the world said was big was not so big at all, and at those times I came to appreciate how the smallest thoughts and deeds can truly become the most significant, all because I am managing to find human greatness at the humble scale of my character. 

 

As much as I am a bibliophile, a book is just paper, ink, and glue. In and of itself, it is nothing, though when I use it as a tool to fine tune my soul it becomes like everything. It is all about staying on task, about recognizing where the real work needs to be done. 

Written in 9/2000