Seneca... on How to Fortify Yourself Against Fear and Misfortune
“If you would not have a
man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”
“Anyone
with any degree of mental toughness,” artist Georgia O’Keeffe wrote in contemplating
life and the art of setting priorities, “ought
to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at
least.” It’s
a beautiful thought, and yet a strange and discomfiting one as we grow
increasingly accustomed and even entitled to the simple, miraculous
conveniences of modern life. I think of O’Keeffe each time I catch myself,
mortified, on the brink of fury over a wifi outage aboard an airplane —
centuries of physics and privilege converging into a superhuman capability
we’ve come to take for granted — and then I quickly reach for Seneca as the ultimate vaccine against this
humiliating hubris.
Two millennia before O’Keeffe, the great
Roman philosopher — a man of timeless wisdom on how to stretch
life’s shortness by living wide rather than long — took this point to
its exquisite extreme in a letter to his friend Lucilius Junior, found in the
altogether indispensable Letters
from a Stoic
Writing
in the month of December — a season of supreme Roman bacchanalia and
intemperate festivities — Seneca offers his friend a recipe for moral
resilience and constancy of mind:
Set aside a certain number of days, during
which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse
and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I
feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should
toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while
Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of
peace the soldier performs maneuvers, throws up earthworks with no enemy in
sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to
unavoidable toil. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes,
train him before it comes.
Let the pallet be a real one, and the coarse
cloak; let the bread be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days
at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of
a mere hobby. Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when
filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of
mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry she grants enough for
our needs.
Seneca
tempers this advice with a reality-check of privilege — for it is, after all, a
luxury of the privileged to practice this as an occasional elective exercise in
character-building rather than a trying daily circumstance of life:
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.
So begin, to … set apart
certain days on which you shall withdraw from your business and make yourself
at home with the scantiest fare. Establish business relations with poverty.
BY MARIA POPOVA https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/15/seneca-letter-18/?mc_cid=2985ffb498&mc_eid=e6325151e8
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