Another month has gone by . . .

Another month has gone by and as is my wont, another post sneaks in.  I read posts from The Daily Stoic and in light of todays world, these words make a lot of sense.  Nothing really has changed in our world except the packaging.

It doesn’t matter who you are, the facts are the same. Marcus Aurelius was Emperor. Epictetus was a slave. Two different fates, but the same reality. Most of life, most situations are out of our control. All we can do is respond to them well. All we can do is endure them.

In December 1950, the United States was deep into the war in Korea. It seemed likely that the conflict would spiral out of control. What would happen next? What could one do? Was it hopeless? Whose fault was it? As Secretary of State, Dean Aiken struggled under this burden. He got a letter from his old friend, the foreign policy visionary George Keenan. It’s advice that bucks you up whether you’re fighting for the future of the free world, or just trying to make it through high school. And here it is:

“In international as in private life, what counts most is not what happens to someone, but how he bears what happens to him. For this reason, almost everything depends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure and disaster to our national fortunes. If we accept it with candor, with dignity with the resolve to absorb its lessons and make it good by redoubled and determined effort, starting all over again, if necessary, along the pattern of Pearl Harbor, we need lose neither our self confidence nor our allies, nor our powers for bargaining. But if we try to conceal from our own people, or from our allies, the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster or petulance or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world position, and of our confidence in ourselves.”

We’ve talked before about this kind of paradox in stoicism. The stoics were boldly optimistic and ruthlessly pragmatic. They always believed that they could endure the worst circumstances and they accepted the brutal facts of those circumstances. They saw the unquestionable major disaster and the unprecedented major opportunity.

As Ryan Holiday writes in Lives of the Stoics (which you can pick up at The Daily Stoic Store), Xeno loses his entire fortune in a shipwreck. But by bearing this with grace and fortitude, he was able to discover a philosophy that changed the world. Marcus was the leader of Rome through a series of crises that matched Truman’s: a war and a 15-year pandemic. Cato faced a republic on the brink of collapse. Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Agrippinus, Rutilius, and Helvidius, all were exiled.

These were difficult moments, but they bore them well with competence, dignity, candor, most of all unflappable perseverance. They might have temporarily bemoaned it, but they knew, as Epictetus knew, that becoming an Olympic class athlete takes sweat. So they stuck to it, just as you must.