Seneca, Moral Letters 29.5

So while I prepare myself to deal with Marcellinus, do you in the meantime, who are able, and who understand whence and whither you have made your way, and who for that reason have an inkling of the distance yet to go, regulate your character, rouse your courage, and stand firm in the face of things which have terrified you. 

 

Do not count the number of those who inspire fear in you. Would you not regard as foolish one who was afraid of a multitude in a place where only one at a time could pass? 

 

Just so, there are not many who have access to you to slay you, though there are many who threaten you with death. Nature has so ordered it that, as only one has given you life, so only one will take it away. 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 29 

 

As much as I can try to understand and assist someone like a Marcellinus, my efforts will be pointless if I don’t first attend to improving myself. 

 

I think of a neighbor who would leave us notes complaining about our tall grass, even as he had a collection of old kitchen appliances strewn around his yard. The most critical part of it wasn’t that he may have been wrong, but rather that I was so tempted to respond with an equal measure of spite and pettiness. 

 

Where is the good in fretting over another’s flaws, when I am unwilling to come to terms with my own? Here I complain that he can’t tell his ass from his elbow, and yet I remain quite incapable of thinking my way out of a paper bag. The very fact that I am looking to the outside for a diversion is a sign of something being neglected on the inside. 

 

Whatever the particular circumstances of my worry, my fear, my resentment, or my longing, there must come a point where I recognize how my own estimation stands behind all of them. Like a soldier who discovers how his mindset is a far greater threat than any enemy on the battlefield, so I am called to put my house in order. 

 

I can put together a laundry list of the things I love and the things I hate, though the number of items on that list does not need to increase the urgency of either my desire or of my terror. Each challenge will arrive in its own time, and in its own way, and my capacity to face each in turn derives entirely from my moral preparedness. 

 

When it comes to the defining matters of life, a quantity of hardships is always trumped by a quality of virtues. 

 

In the end, of course, death, the one thing I am inclined to dread the most, will only happen once. Even that ceases to be a hazard when I no longer perceive it as a hindrance to the exercise of character. 

—Reflection written in 11/2012 

IMAGE: Horace Vernet, The Soldier on the Field of Battle (1818)