I am not speaking with you in the Stoic strain but in my milder style. For it is our Stoic fashion to speak of all those things, which provoke cries and groans, as unimportant and beneath notice; but you and I must drop such great-sounding words, although, Heaven knows, they are true enough.
What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.
Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.
When someone tells me that my worries are in my head, I may be tempted to think that he is diminishing how I feel, and yet he may not be brushing aside my concerns at all, but rather reminding me how I have it within my power to tame them. As real as the trouble seems to me, whatever arose out of my own judgments can also be put right back in its place by my own judgments.
If I am honest with myself, I will indeed discover that the danger is more often in my estimations than in the circumstances, that the threat is something of my own making. What I can’t see will terrify me over what I can see, what is possible will haunt me instead of what is actual.
Even as I have been pondering Stoicism for some time, and working daily to put those principles into practice, I have moments where I still find myself deeply discouraged, assuming that the goal of such inner peace is too far beyond my reach.
Some of that has to do with the weight of my old habits, though I must also admit that the noble and lofty style of the philosophers, what Seneca here calls the “Stoic fashion”, can rub me the wrong way, depending upon the state of my mood.
That need not be an obstacle, however, since the same message can be made more palatable by leaving aside the grand rhetoric, for the moment, and focusing in on a much more comfortable scale. Let me start by taking smaller bites.
Instead of boldly saying that all fears and pains are insignificant, I can just recognize how easily I am making mountains out of molehills, how a frustration I see before me, right here and now, is not so big after all. It doesn’t have to be about the burdens of mortality, or the fight for a deeper justice, or the quest for ultimate meaning; it can be about the nagging anxieties that slow me down during my day.
I observe that I am regularly fretting over something that hasn’t happened yet, and even over something that shows no real sign of ever happening at all. It is idle speculation that is bringing me down. When I consider only what is immediately in front of me, I tend to magnify it out of proportion, or add all sorts of associations coming from my vivid imagination, which have more to do with my baggage than with the matter at hand.
Seneca sums it up nicely: I foolishly choose to distort what is, to obsess with what isn’t, and to shudder at what might be.
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