Seneca, Moral Letters 13.5

Do me the favor, when men surround you and try to talk you into believing that you are unhappy, to consider not what you hear but what you yourself feel, and to take counsel with your feelings and question yourself independently, because you know your own affairs better than anyone else does. 

 

Ask: "Is there any reason why these persons should condole with me? Why should they be worried or even fear some infection from me, as if troubles could be transmitted? Is there any evil involved, or is it a matter merely of ill report, rather than an evil?" 

 

Put the question voluntarily to yourself: "Am I tormented without sufficient reason, am I morose, and do I convert what is not an evil into what is an evil?”  

 

Sometimes my false imaginings can come from a deeply private place, and sometimes they are urged on by an intense public pressure, but my doubts and fears will fester in me because I am failing to look behind the appearances. 

 

Yet to untangle fantasy from reality seems like an impossible task initially, since the impressions feel so vivid, such that in the heat of the moment I can easily confuse up for down. 

 

I have long searched for some sort of secret formula, only to discover that the remedy is rather mundane: I must slowly step aside from my passions, as if I were placing them right outside myself, and ask whether the danger is in something that came to me, or in something I added to the situation. 

 

If I am being completely honest, I then usually find that most of what I thought was authentic is gently stripped away. I am left with the bare bones of an event that actually happened, and a rather large pile of mental detritus. 

 

When I was little, I would sometimes be certain that something was moving in the shadows around my bed, and turning on the light in the hallway just seemed to give the shadows more substance. 

 

When I was older, I would lie awake for hours, dwelling on someone who had walked away from me, and however much I tried to change the channel in my head, her face would always pop right back up. 

 

But there were no gremlins, and she wasn’t standing there, and while appealing to the calm power of my judgment didn’t make the images go away at first, it did gradually put them in their rightful place as illusions. 

 

When I go out into the world, I come across many people who tell me what I ought to be worried about. They assure me that this threat or that crisis will destroy us all, and that I will only be spared if I take urgent action right now. 

 

They insist that I should be afraid of poverty, or loneliness, or disease, and I have to wonder why they think they know me so well. When I reflect carefully upon myself, it turns out that the best advice I can heed is to beware of my own vices. That is something under my control, and upon which everything else depends. 

 

There is a classic Stoic lesson at work here: do not imagine an evil where none is present. That a circumstance has come or gone is never a good or an evil, and that I am feeling a certain way is not of benefit or of harm, until I have chosen to do something with the experience. I ultimately suffer only as much as I allow myself to suffer. 

Written in 6/2012

IMAGE: Auguste Toulmouche, The Lost Love (c. 1870)