Epictetus, Discourses 1.12.3

Are we to say then that in this sphere alone, the greatest and most momentous of all, the sphere of freedom, it is permitted me to indulge chance desires? 

 

By no means: education is just this—learning to frame one's will in accord with events. 

 

How do events happen? They happen as the Disposer of events has ordained them. He ordained summer and winter, fruitful and barren seasons, virtue and vice and all such opposites for the sake of the harmony of the Universe, and gave to each one of us a body and bodily parts and property and men to associate with. 

 

Remembering then that things are thus ordained we ought to approach education, not that we may change the conditions of life, that is not given to us, nor is it good for us—but that, our circumstances being as they are and as Nature makes them, we may conform our mind to events.

 

“I want this! Give me that! Hear my demands!”

 

And so I may believe that my freedom is only working correctly when everything else goes my way. It has apparently not occurred to me that my way does not exist in isolation, that I am a piece of a bigger picture, one thread in a vast tapestry. 

 

Yes, it is about me, but I am not all that there is. I totally retain my power to judge and to choose, though my foolishness arises from an insistence that my judging and choosing should determine everything around me. 

 

As a wise mentor once told me: “Be free in things, not from things.”

 

A pure subjectivism, which is nothing but the greatest egoism, is much like a spoiled toddler’s temper tantrum. We try to teach the child to change himself through his own choices, and yet he is only satisfied when the rest of the world conforms to his own choices. How odd that we frown upon it on the playground, and we still praise it in the boardroom. 

 

I can indeed desire anything I want, though I forget to first ask whether it is right and good to want it; will must be tempered by conscience. Again, a proper education helps me to become accountable instead of feeling entitled. 

 

Reasoned decisions bear abundant fruit, arbitrary decisions are more like pissing into the wind. 

 

If it was made as it was, there is a perfectly good reason why it was made that way, even if I don’t initially understand it. What can I do to make the situation helpful, to employ it prudently? No good will come from just asking the situation to alter upon my whim. 

 

Freedom begs us, first and foremost, to control ourselves; leave it to the higher wisdom of Providence to manage what is beyond our control. Reverse the presumption of conformity, from a will that rages against the real to a will that can find meaning in the real. 

Written in 12/2000