Practice like a Stoic: 18, Keep your peace of mind in mind

Try not to go to pieces every time someone splashes some water on you

The Roman baths at Bath, England. Image from vidiguides.com, CC license.

[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics—How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic. Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 119-123 of the paperback edition.]

“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)

So, did you enjoy your week break after we finished the discipline of desire and aversion? Good, now it’s time to get back to work! For the next several weeks 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.”

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?