Premeditatio Malorum
Life can knock us on our ass, can’t it?
Just out of nowhere, our legs are suddenly in the air and we’re on the ground.
An email from your investors — they are pulling out. A phone call from your wife — your place has burned down. The specifics vary for each one of us but in a second, your whole life changes.
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
– Epictetus
So … how do you respond? How do you carry on?
1) Get control of yourself
First, we must steady our nerves and take hold of any extreme emotions (anger, fear, resentment). Replace them with grace.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
– Viktor Frankl
2) Let the past be the past
What happened, happened.
Embrace apatheia.
Apatheia is the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind.
Don’t let the negativity in, don’t let those emotions even get started.
Just say: “No, thank you. I can’t afford to panic. I can’t afford to make it worse.”
3) Look for some good in the situation
Viktor Frankl, when he lost nearly everyone he loved in the Holocaust, was able to find solace in the fact that they were spared the pain that he felt. That they did not have to live through the horrors he faced.
“A good person dyes events with his own color … and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.”
– Seneca
Amor fati
The great philosopher Nietzsche’s recipe for greatness was the phrase amor fati.
“That one,” he said, “wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.”
Two thousand years ago, writing in his own personal journal which would become known as Meditations, Emperor Marcus Aurelius would say: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”
Another Stoic, Epictetus, who as a crippled slave has faced adversity after adversity, echoed the same: “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”
Prepare for what could go wrong
Premeditatio malorum (“the pre-meditation of evils”) is a Stoic exercise of imagining things that could go wrong or be taken away from us. It helps us prepare for life’s inevitable setbacks and develop resilience in the face of uncertainty.
We don’t always get what is rightfully ours, even if we’ve earned it. Not everything is as clean and straightforward as we think they may be.
Also, you must understand that what happened to you once, can happen to you again.
And yet, that is something people have found themselves saying throughout this pandemic. It is something that past leaders with ignominious histories have also said during other times of uncertainty or difficulty.
- As if there was no such thing as variants or double dip recessions…
- As if it’s not possible for bad things to get worse…
- As if something you fixed once can’t come undone or reoccur…
- As if 100-year storms only happen once every hundred years…
- As if the roulette wheel can’t hit double-zero again, on the very next spin…
- As if some people or places don’t get freakishly unlucky…
- As if the person who wronged you and got away with it isn’t now actually more likely to do it again (even though they’ve assured you otherwise).
Summary
There will always be obstacles and drawbacks - that’s inevitable.
Your response is what matters. That is what’s truly in your control.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
– Viktor Frankl