There are periods in every life where the pace seems relentless. We roll from one crisis to another, sometimes feeling like survival alone is challenging. For some of us, these are short periods before we get back into a smoother rhythm. For others, the challenges can keep coming, one after another, until it seems almost impossible to continue. In either case, there are things that we can do to help ourselves. One of those things is to take advice from the Stoics.
Developing mental resilience is a practice. It requires challenges to struggle against, and, like athletic practice, it is helpful to rest between times of stress. Life doesn’t always offer us this rest. I have found it helpful to treat each challenge or issue as its own thing. When I was younger, I was lucky enough to have a pair of uncles who taught me that even small things can feel overwhelming if we bundle them together in our minds. I learned the lesson of breaking things into separate challenges to make them more manageable.
During his reign as emperor, Marcus Aurelius dealt with plague, treason, war and the loss of as many as 9 of his children. He struggled with poor health for most of his life before succumbing to an infection at the age of 58. His son and heir, Commodus, was clearly not the successor Marcus would have wished for (in fact, his solo reign may have led to the end of an era of peace and prosperity in the Roman Empire.) And yet, Marcus repeatedly admonished himself in his “Meditations” to focus just on the present moment and not be troubled by things outside of his control. He also reminded himself “Nothing that happens is unusual or unnatural, and there’s no sense in complaining. Nature does not make us endure the unendurable.” If life sometimes seems unfair and unrelenting, it is temporary and complaining will not improve the situation.
Bridgewater CEO and author of “Principles of Life and Work”, Ray Dalio, advises confronting our problems head-on. “The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.” He also advocates for identifying new challenges as examples of previously met ones – which can help reframe a setback or loss.
Marcus and other stoics remind us to note the things in our control and take action on them. By making progress in even one small area or addressing one issue out of many, we can regain some semblance of control when all seems to be conspiring against us.
Finally, it is worth remembering that our emotions are not facts, and we can control our emotions even at very difficult times. As Marcus put it, “When jarred unavoidably by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony of you keep on going back to it.”
Next time it seems to you that life is handing you an unrelenting series of shit sandwiches, try to remember that the events (and life itself) are temporary. We will move out of the period of struggle, and will be better able to respond while in it if we remember to act on those things we can control. We can also remember that our emotions need not drive us – we can decide how we react to life’s challenges. Repeatedly practising intentional responses will make a calmer demeanour easier to maintain, even in very trying circumstances. While very few of us are ever likely to deal with the level of challenge that Marcus dealt with, we share a common humanity with those who went before us. We can leverage the lessons of our predecessors to make our present more palatable.
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