Just as in the body symptoms of latent ill-health precede the disease—there is, for example, a certain weak sluggishness, a lassitude which is not the result of any work, a trembling, and a shivering that pervades the limbs—so the feeble spirit is shaken by its ills a long time before it is overcome by them. It anticipates them, and totters before its time.
But what is greater madness than to be tortured by the future and not to save your strength for the actual suffering, but to invite and bring on wretchedness? If you cannot be rid of it, you ought at least to postpone it. Will you not understand that no man should be tormented by the future?
The man who has been told that he will have to endure torture fifty years from now is not disturbed thereby, unless he has leaped over the intervening years, and has projected himself into the trouble that is destined to arrive a generation later.
In the same way, souls that enjoy being sick and that seize upon excuses for sorrow are saddened by events long past and effaced from the records. Past and future are both absent; we feel neither of them. But there can be no pain except as the result of what you feel. Farewell.
But what is greater madness than to be tortured by the future and not to save your strength for the actual suffering, but to invite and bring on wretchedness? If you cannot be rid of it, you ought at least to postpone it. Will you not understand that no man should be tormented by the future?
The man who has been told that he will have to endure torture fifty years from now is not disturbed thereby, unless he has leaped over the intervening years, and has projected himself into the trouble that is destined to arrive a generation later.
In the same way, souls that enjoy being sick and that seize upon excuses for sorrow are saddened by events long past and effaced from the records. Past and future are both absent; we feel neither of them. But there can be no pain except as the result of what you feel. Farewell.
—from Seneca, Moral Letters 74
If there is something I can do about it, there is no need to worry, because I have the power to act right now.
If there is nothing I can do about it, there is no need to worry, because it will unfold as it will, in its own sweet time.
The gift of reason allows me to understand what is and to speculate on what could be, though that blessing can become a curse when I fret over anything beyond my control. It is both enlightening and humbling to realize how much time I have wasted on anxiety, when my efforts are always better directed at simply improving myself.
I spent almost two years unable to get a proper night’s sleep, haunted by the image of who my lost love might be gracing with her presence. This only ceased, from one day to the next, when I finally accepted the obvious, that no amount of hand-wringing would change how she felt, though my own attachments clearly followed from my own values.
The twinge has never quite left, like a poorly healed wound, but the crippling obsession is now behind me.
Almost two decades later, I am at a point where I have a fairly good sense of how the rest will play itself out, and though Fortune may still throw me a for a loop, my deliberate attention to living for the day, sometimes by the hour, has freed me from so much of my fear. While I suspect some of it will surely hurt, I know I have it within me to face my demons, even if I go it alone. At the very least, the discomfort will soon pass.
Seneca correctly observed how our malaise is self-imposed, almost as if we wish to suffer long before we actually have to suffer. The past is long gone, and the future is yet to come, and the tragic result is that we fuss over the unreal at the expense of the real, manufacturing a dread that blinds us to all that is immediately noble inside us.
I always retain my capacity for virtue, and there can be no greater comfort than that!
If there is something I can do about it, there is no need to worry, because I have the power to act right now.
If there is nothing I can do about it, there is no need to worry, because it will unfold as it will, in its own sweet time.
The gift of reason allows me to understand what is and to speculate on what could be, though that blessing can become a curse when I fret over anything beyond my control. It is both enlightening and humbling to realize how much time I have wasted on anxiety, when my efforts are always better directed at simply improving myself.
I spent almost two years unable to get a proper night’s sleep, haunted by the image of who my lost love might be gracing with her presence. This only ceased, from one day to the next, when I finally accepted the obvious, that no amount of hand-wringing would change how she felt, though my own attachments clearly followed from my own values.
The twinge has never quite left, like a poorly healed wound, but the crippling obsession is now behind me.
Almost two decades later, I am at a point where I have a fairly good sense of how the rest will play itself out, and though Fortune may still throw me a for a loop, my deliberate attention to living for the day, sometimes by the hour, has freed me from so much of my fear. While I suspect some of it will surely hurt, I know I have it within me to face my demons, even if I go it alone. At the very least, the discomfort will soon pass.
Seneca correctly observed how our malaise is self-imposed, almost as if we wish to suffer long before we actually have to suffer. The past is long gone, and the future is yet to come, and the tragic result is that we fuss over the unreal at the expense of the real, manufacturing a dread that blinds us to all that is immediately noble inside us.
I always retain my capacity for virtue, and there can be no greater comfort than that!
—Reflection written in 10/2013
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