Seneca, Moral Letters 13.6

You may retort with the question: "How am I to know whether my sufferings are real or imaginary?" 

 

Here is the rule for such matters: We are tormented either by things present, or by things to come, or by both. 

 

As to things present, the decision is easy. Suppose that your person enjoys freedom and health, and that you do not suffer from any external injury. 

 

As to what may happen to it in the future, we shall see later on. Today there is nothing wrong with it.

 

It is all too easy to get turned around, to end up chasing my own tail, to start questioning my own commitments. In theory, philosophers will ask about epistemological certainty, or how we can know that we know, and this expresses itself just as much in practice, when I begin to doubt that I can ever overcome my doubts. 

 

For being such a profound and radical philosophy, Stoicism is actually an approach grounded in common sense, and never asks me to believe in anything that is not present to my experience. 

 

Some thinkers may wish to doubt away what is self-evident, but the Stoic will have none of that. How I should live, for instance, is not derived from some soaring intellectual construct, but proceeds directly from seeing what I am, which is revealed by reflecting on any of my acts. 

 

To manage my own suffering, I must calmly look at what sort of things are troubling me. Is it happening right now? Then by the power I have in my nature at this very moment, I am able to change my thinking, to recognize that nothing from the outside can force itself upon the value of my own choices. 

 

Is it something that could still come to be? It might, or it just as readily might not, but for right now it is nothing at all. If it does happen to occur, and I am still here to face it, I will still possess the very same tools of judgment I am using at this very moment, no more and no less. 

 

This will still sit badly with some, but I would suggest this is only because we get confused about our priorities. Could I immediately lose my property, or my reputation, or my comforts? Yes, and no amount of worrying will change that situation. Meanwhile, my own attitude presently remains under my control. 

 

Could it happen tomorrow, or in a week, or in a year? Yes, and now I am twice removed from any solution, compounding a handwringing over circumstances beyond me with the agony of wild conjecture. 

 

Let me stick with what I can do, not what is done to me, and with what is actual, not what is merely possible. 

Written in 6/2012