Seneca, Moral Letters 11.5

But my letter calls for its closing sentence. Hear and take to heart this useful and wholesome motto: “Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them.” 

 

Such, my dear Lucilius, is the counsel of Epicurus; he has quite properly given us a guardian and an attendant. We can get rid of most sins, if we have a witness who stands near us when we are likely to go wrong. The soul should have someone whom it can respect—one by whose authority it may make even its inner shrine more hallowed. 

 

Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts! 

 

And happy also is he who can so revere a man as to calm and regulate himself by calling him to mind! One who can so revere another, will soon be himself worthy of reverence.

 

Once again, I adore how Seneca appeals to Epicurus, the founder of a competing school of philosophy. It reminds me how I must always find the good in everything, regardless of its source. 

 

Many things will happen to me, and a good number of them will be quite unexpected. Many tendencies will be placed inside me, and it will often be hard to come to terms with them. Many feelings will come over me, the most challenging being the ones I never even chose. 

 

Should I consider it all a tangled mess, a chaos of circumstances, a wave of Fate? This is how I might initially think about the things that are not under my control. Yet they point right to the Stoic solution, to find a measure of meaning and purpose precisely through the things that are under my control. 

 

This is why character is the ultimate measure of human worth, why wisdom and virtue are the final arbiters of a good life. Yes, this is how everything else has unfolded, both for the world around me and for the dispositions within me, and now it is my turn to use my power of judgment, to take those conditions and put them all to good use. 

 

These are the cards that were dealt—now how will I play them? 

 

What should I risk, and what should I cling to? What is absolute, and what is relative? The rules of life aren’t always easy to figure out, and there will be many blunders and losses. As it is with learning to play a game of cards, it helps mightily to have a mentor, a model to emulate. 

 

I have never been terribly good at poker, but what little I do know came from following the example of my old friend, Hayward. Now that he is gone, I try to imagine what he would do with a certain hand; he provides me with a standard to this day, and I still hear him cussing at me when I have pushed my luck. 

 

Life isn’t poker, obviously, and yet in life it also helps so much to have people I look up to, and who in turn looks out for me. None of us need to go it alone. 

 

This is why heroes can assist us with our convictions, which offer a direction to our circumstances. 

 

I don’t mean the fake heroes who tell us how to dress or sound clever, or the shallow heroes who teach us how to get rich and famous, or the lucky heroes who happen to have an enviable knack. No, I mean the real heroes who decide to excel at being human, and who know what it’s about. 

 

Any person of honest understanding and love can be such a hero; he is usually marked by his modesty instead of any showmanship. If I seek out a person like that, I will find a touch of comfort and encouragement; it makes the journey so much easier. 

 

It will also reveal how Nature is not such a tangled mess after all. When someone points me in the right direction, he has done right for me, and when I show him his due respect, I have done right for him. There is the harmony, and there is the complementarity that comes from recognizing that we are all made for one another. 

Written in 6/2012