Hello friend, This is the second post in a series of 39 where I share 39 pieces of the pithiest Stoic wisdom.
Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been. – Marcus Aurelius
One of the secrets to life is not to take things personally.
When we let people, events, and things influence us, our judgment can become clouded.
We get emotionally affected, and if we don’t quickly regain control over our emotions, we can become reactive and act in unhelpful and unvirtuous ways, which, if repeated enough, can cause problems.
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius said, “ When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”
When you know that many people are like this, you get better at not taking what they say too seriously.
2 Steps To Practically Use This Advice
- Care about your own opinion of yourself more than others. Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations, “It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” In the book Burn The Fat Feed the Muscle, Tom Venuto states that psychologists have worked out that we think up to 60,000 thoughts per day and that most of these thoughts are the same ones we had yesterday, and most of them negative, in a year that’s almost 22 million thoughts. This is why replacing negative thoughts with positive ones is extremely important. As Marcus Aurelius says, “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the colour of your thoughts.”
- Never forget point one and remember ad infinitum.
Things Can Only Affect Our Soul If We Let Them
Ultimately, it’s up to us if we let external events affect us.
If something bad happens to us, we can say, “Yes, something bad has happened to me, but I accept it. It can only harm me if it harms my character, and because I haven’t allowed my character to be affected, neither have I.”
“It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you—inside or out.” – Marcus Aurelius
It might sound overly simplistic to allow oneself not to be affected by external events ( especially negative ones).
But the truth is, we first choose not to be affected by external events and instead choose to orient our lives to hone good character in ourselves.
So what do we do?
We focus on virtues.
In mediations by Marcus Aurelius he says “ If, at some point in your life, you should come across anything better than justice, honesty, self-control, courage—than a mind satisfied that it has succeeded in enabling you to act rationally, and satisfied to accept what’s beyond its control—if you find anything better than that, embrace it without reservations—it must be an extraordinary thing indeed—and enjoy it to the full.”
Essentially, Marcus prizes these four main virtues.
Justice – to treat people how they deserve to be treated.
Courage- to put one’s neck on the line for the benefit of others, to sacrifice oneself for the common good.
Honesty – aim for the truth in every word, even to yourself.
Self-control – the ability to always be in control of oneself, no matter what ( Temperance).
You can’t argue with Marcus here, a life focused on cultivating these virtues in oneself, in my opinion, is the recipe for cultivating good character.
In regards to philosophy especially stoicism to really practice it instead of merely talking about it one needs to daily measure himself against a yardstick that includes the aforementioned virtues.
Be The Same In All Circumstances
“ To be the same in all circumstances—intense pain, the loss of a child, chronic illness. And to see clearly, from his example, that a man can show both strength and flexibility” – Marcus Aurelius
What I like about this wisdom is that it teaches us not to get too badly affected when facing adverse life events.
It teaches us to remain level-headed and balanced throughout life’s ups and downs.
I would even extend this advice to when we experience positive times.
Of course, enjoy the goodness that life offers, but realise that negative and positive experiences are temporary and necessary parts of life.
When we can act the same in all circumstances, our character isn’t affected, no matter what we face, and neither are we.
Because if our character is unaffected, we won’t be affected either.
I’m not telling you to be a robot, I’m merely explaining that we need to put the events in our lives into perspective.
Sometimes the sun’s out, and sometimes it’s stormy.
We would be stupid to feel distressed at the world when the weather isn’t great.
And that’s precisely what we do when facing negative situations.
It is better to see negative situations as storms that are followed by sunny days.
When you experience a bad time, know that there will be a sunny day ahead, and it will be much easier to accept the difficult times.
Why It’s Helpful To Remain The Same In All Circumstances
We as humans tend to catastrophize.
Which makes adverse events in our lives seem far worse than they are.
Trying to remain the same in all situations helps us become less affected by adverse situations.
We can either go through negative events screaming and crying or we can go through them like Marcus Aurelius describes in this quote:
“To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.”
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