Recover Your Grip
Daunting about the pursuit of the philosophically-informed life is the notion that one ought to be one-hundred-percent unshakable, unagitated, unfazed, one hundred percent of the time. Fortunate for the fallible human, this is not what philosophy demands.
The "instructress of our hands," as referred to by playwright and philosopher Seneca, impresses upon and aids us with recoverability. Our task in the enriched thinking life is to be wholly and totally recoverable. While our quality of life is largely influenced by what happens, our ability to recover from and utilize what happens is what shapes how we experience our lives.
In the manner of the Stoics, we can make this concrete. This very ability to recover is informed by our habits across the core realms of our lives: the practical, the emotional, and the psychological.
We become practically recoverable through proactive and conscientious choices around the physical and the financial, enabling the ability to physiologically or fiscally recover from related misfortunes. You build resources and you build strength while you're able as a gift you give to a version of you that isn't.
We become emotionally recoverable by consciously cultivating a sense of perspective, regularly employing the Stoic "view from above" technique where one zooms out to pull all of time into view, allowing for a more accurate weighting of certain matters in isolation.
We become psychologically recoverable through actualization, that of spending the majority of our output-focused time at the edge of our capability such that we can see evidence of our demonstrated potential, and so too, that which may be ahead even still.
Make no mistake: The ability to recover, to not "lose" more time than necessary in the wake of the unexpected, is enhanced by our daily practices. “If you feel that you are falling away and losing your hold," Marcus Aurelius offers in Book X of Meditations, "then withdraw undismayed into some corner where you can recover your grip.”
And so, how recoverable are you? May we stride ever toward the levels we seek.
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