Keep your peace of mind in mind
As we go about our day, our minds naturally turn toward accomplishing our goals. This can be useful in achieving those goals, but can also come at a cost. If all we think about is accomplishing the goal, we put our mental well-being in the hands of chance. This is what happened to Ameerah as she felt her anger rising as she considered the guy using the squat rack for bicep curls. Her main goal was to get her squats in, and by chance someone was using the equipment for something he didn’t need it for. While curling in the squat rack is definitely bad gym etiquette, the Stoics would caution that anger isn’t useful in this situation. How can we maintain our composure when coping with the frustrations we encounter while going about our day?
"When you are about to take something in hand, remind yourself what manner of thing it is. If you are going to bathe, put before your mind what happens in the bath—water pouring over some, others being jostled, some reviling, others stealing; and you will set to work more securely if you say to yourself at once: ‘I want to bathe, and I want to keep my will in harmony with nature,’ and so in each thing you do. For in this way, if anything turns up to hinder you in your bathing, you will be ready to say: ‘I did not want only to bathe, but to keep my will in harmony with nature, and I shall not so keep it, if I lose my temper at what happens.’”
Epictetus, Enchiridion, 4
This is the first exercise of the second discipline: action. In this section we are going to focus on how Stoics behave in response to external situations, particularly when it comes to dealing with other people. But as you just read from Epictetus, responding to external situations still places heavy emphasis on our internal state. Here we find Epictetus at his best: clear, insightful, and even a bit poetic. We love the image of someone going out to do something, such as visiting the thermal baths or the gym, keeping in mind that we always have two objectives: to do what we set out to do, but also to keep our inner calm, or what Epictetus refers to as “harmony with the universe.” We may or may not succeed at the first task since that is not (entirely) up to us, but we will definitely succeed at the second one so long as we don’t let ourselves lose our temper at the first inconvenience. Another translation, by Robert Dobbin, of this piece from Epictetus is more funny than poetic, ending instead with “I cannot keep harmony with nature if I go to pieces every time someone splashes some water on me.”1
The point is to reflect on what is likely to happen before it happens. We know, as a matter of experience with fellow human beings, that people will splash each other at the baths or violate gym etiquette. It is precisely this experiential knowledge of how people behave that we now turn to our advantage and use to mentally prepare for what might happen. As we discovered in Week 6 when practicing premeditatio malorum, mental preparation is crucial to maintaining our calm and not allowing predictable annoyances to disturb our serenity and inner equilibrium. It’s also significant in Stoic physics (which admittedly sounds abstract): By knowing and accepting how the world is ahead of time, the world becomes less surprising and frustrating when we actually face it.
There are countless occasions on which this exercise is useful, because we can rely on some person or other to behave improperly in pretty much every situation. Perhaps you are out in your car enjoying a nice drive with your family when someone cuts you off because that’s the sort of thing he does. Or you take the subway and the person next to you, mistaking the train car for her bathroom, gingerly cuts her nails. Or . . . you get the point, right?