Seneca, Moral Letters 18.5

There is no reason, however, why you should think that you are doing anything great; for you will merely be doing what many thousands of slaves and many thousands of poor men are doing every day. 

 

But you may credit yourself with this item—that you will not be doing it under compulsion, and that it will be as easy for you to endure it permanently as to make the experiment from time to time. 

 

Let us practice our strokes on the "dummy"; let us become intimate with poverty, so that Fortune may not catch us off our guard. We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden. 

 

At the very least I am an eccentric, at the very most an outcast, and so it would seem odd that I can still find myself caring about gaining acceptance and approval. It is, of course, perfectly natural to prefer to be liked, but the danger arises when I confuse such a preference with a necessity. 

 

Having been told for so long how my deeds should be measured by being impressive and noteworthy, I easily forget to focus on the virtue of the act itself, and not to demand any greatness in the eyes of the world. 

 

For every man who receives praise for his efforts, many thousands more who have done just as much, if not far more, will go completely unnoticed. I suspect that Providence makes Fortune fickle so that we can learn what truly matters: attend to the grittiness of the doing rather than the glamor of the seeming. 

 

There is nothing extraordinary in bearing extreme hardships, as most people in the world must do, though there is reason to feel some pride in embracing them willingly and graciously. What will happen will happen, and while I am not free to set up the world on my terms, I am most certainly free to form my own attitude and determine my own actions. 

 

If I go out of my way to build up a resilience to circumstances, by practices like fasting, or refusing luxuries, or avoiding fame, I am making myself ready for what will come when life takes an unexpected turn. I am then taking a responsibility for myself instead of letting happiness be contingent upon some game of chance.

 

Or did I think that I somehow “earned” my fancy degree, or my comfortable house, or the perks of my title? Will I insist that I deserve a “right” to such trappings? I may indeed have worked for them, but I did not provide them for myself, since a concurrence of events and the judgments of others gave these externals to me. 

 

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that is just as true for a moral watchfulness as it is for a medical preparedness. Take the effort to forge a sound habit now, and so endure and thrive more easily later. 

 

I still vividly remember the father of a childhood friend, who would practice martial arts with a training dummy in his yard like clockwork every afternoon, and then sit down quietly under a tree before a small statue of the Buddha. 

 

I once asked him why he did this so precisely and rigorously. He smiled, and said only, “For when the time comes.” I was not sure what he meant then, but I think I can make a bit more sense of it now. 

Written in 8/2012