Seneca, Moral Letters 72.4

The difference, I say, between a man of perfect wisdom and another who is progressing in wisdom is the same as the difference between a healthy man and one who is convalescing from a severe and lingering illness, for whom "health" means only a lighter attack of his disease. 

 

If the latter does not take heed, there is an immediate relapse and a return to the same old trouble; but the wise man cannot slip back, or slip into any more illness at all. 

 

For health of body is a temporary matter which the physician cannot guarantee, even though he has restored it; nay, he is often roused from his bed to visit the same patient who summoned him before. The mind, however, once healed, is healed for good and all. 

 

I shall tell you what I mean by health: if the mind is content with its own self; if it has confidence in itself; if it understands that all those things for which men pray, all the benefits which are bestowed and sought for, are of no importance in relation to a life of happiness; under such conditions it is sound. 

 

For anything that can be added to is imperfect; anything that can suffer loss is not lasting; but let the man whose happiness is to be lasting, rejoice in what is truly his own. 

 

Now all that which the crowd gapes after, ebbs and flows. Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own. But even these gifts of Fortune please us when reason has tempered and blended them to our taste; for it is reason which makes acceptable to us even external goods that are disagreeable to use if we absorb them too greedily. 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 72 

 

When I was still a young pup, my mother made a point of keeping me home from school for at least one extra day after I had overcome a fever, to make certain I could build up my strength. This annoyed the teachers to no end, since they were enslaved by their lesson plans, and any absence would make a mess of their sacred statistics, but she wouldn’t budge, insisting that health mattered far more than bureaucracy. 

 

When I later became a teacher, I noticed how students were far too careless about getting sick, and so they all spent much the of the year in sort of a state of semi-illness, never quite recovered, and forever prone to the next wave of infections, because they had actually lost sight of what it even meant to be healthy. One half of the room was always sniffling, while the other half was always coughing. 

 

I must never confuse feeling a “bit better” with being cured, and that applies to the spirit as much as it does to the flesh. All too often, I have made the slightest bit of progress, and then hastily assumed that the work was done, only to find myself right back where I started, and perhaps in an even worse place, on account of the shame I felt from my failure. Once bitten, twice shy. 

 

Health is not being free from obstacles, but rather possessing the capacity to cope with obstacles, and so just as the body resists a disease, so the mind overcomes its circumstances. The relapse is unfortunately a sign that the work was not complete, when the expectation has rushed ahead of the reality, and the careful discipline of preparation is the best remedy against disappointment. 

 

I know all too well how the body is continually subject to corruption, and so I will be inclined to believe that the mind must be just the same, yet I am forgetting how the soul is subject only to its own judgments, as long as it remains firm in its own convictions. While disease may slowly but surely take hold of what is on the outside, a man has the power to remain invincible on the inside, according to his choice. 

 

This is why the “Stoic Sage” is not some figment of the imagination—nothing can hinder him except himself. He will face hardships, and he will confront temptations, and he will be racked with doubts, while through it all he knows that he can rise above anything Fortune might throw his way. 

 

Even as his flesh gives way, he remains constant in the virtues, thereby possessing a complete moral health. He knows who he is, in his very nature, and why no one can ever take that away from him. 

—Reflection written in 9/2013