Everything Is For Our Benefit
Central among Stoic advisements is not only that of owning our reactions to any stimuli, but our interpretations of them. Our experience is in the interpretation (for better or worse).
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds us that the power to reframe any instance lies with us. “For the mind adapts and converts everything that impedes its activities into something that advances its purpose," Aurelius says, "and a hindrance to its action becomes an aid, and an obstacle on its path helps it on its way.”
We must intend everything for our benefit. Endowed with reason, we have the ability to choose how we see things, how we interpret the people and events that make up our lives, and how we respond. Any and every occurrence presents us with an opportunity to become better if we see it as such.
Author Ryan Holiday effectively captures this concept in The Obstacle Is The Way with the following: “Discipline in perception lets you clearly see the advantage and the proper course of action in every situation—without the pestilence of panic or fear.”
Discipline in perception. Not discipline in practice, or action, or anything else by which we’re used to “discipline” being an adjacent idea, but perception. Being disciplined in perception means that at first exposure to any situation, we’re immediately responsible for and in immediate control of the thoughts we form thereafter. It’s a level of accountability beyond anything we’ve been taught, and one that will avail us to experiences richer than any we’ve had.
Discipline in perception reframes our past and invigorates our present, freeing us to decide how the uncontrollable affects us.
May we decide well.
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