Build your own fortress

A place where no one can enter except you

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

I'd written about Ataraxia before. It's the goal of Stoicism. A clear and serene state of mind where you see the world and events with equanimity, treating others with kindness and without expecting anything. Always calm and feeling fulfilled… Sound great, right?

But it's not rare that someone in your work or maybe some event you see on the TV wake feelings inside you. And that's fine and natural. Stoicism is not about suppressing your feelings and being cold; it's about using the gift Nature gave to all of us to control them: our logical mind.

So, how to fight those situations? Fortunately, the stoics already deal with this. They practice something called the view from above. The main idea behind this is to witness the case as another person. Epictetus talks about this in his Enquiridion, 26; a nowadays example could be you seeing someone feeling bad because her computer crashed and lost the last half of an hour's work because she didn’t commit it and you say to her that “it’s ok, this kind of things happens” but when the same thing happens to you, you act like the world sets on fire, just like the one you try to calm before. That’s not coherent.

We should try to view every single event in our lives like another person just as an exercise of giving perspective to those events. Bad things may seem bigger than they actually are in our tiny worlds of children+job+home-centered life. But if you put some distance with the current event, trying to see it as it happens to another one helps a lot.

Maybe you drop a glass of water and it shatters on the floor and you have to clean your house but in another place on the Earth, there is someone more unfortunate than you. There are hungry, wars, and natural disasters… Your glass is not that important.