🏛️ Enhance your Stoic practice. My private community, Prokoptôn, is now open. Weekly calls, a book club, and 1:1 sessions with me. Click here to start your 7-day free trial.
People are going to annoy you (a lot)
Suppose that at the gymnasium somebody hath all to-torn thee with his nails, and hath broken thy head. Well, thou art wounded. Yet thou dost not exclaim; thou art not offended with him.
Marcus uses the image of a sparring partner at the gymnasium. Someone scratches us, clips our head, draws blood. We don't take it personally. We don't storm off and file a complaint. We understand the context: this is what happens when you wrestle.
So then, “keep the same disposition in the rest of life.”
People will be thoughtless today. Someone will cut in front of us, take credit for something, say something careless, or be gratuitously rude for no apparent reason. These are the scrapes and cuts of ordinary life. They come with the territory.
Marcus isn't saying we should enjoy being scratched, he's saying we should stop being surprised by it. "It is very possible for us to avoid and decline," he writes, "though we neither suspect, nor hate." We can protect ourselves without turning every annoyance into a moral crisis.
The person who wronged us probably didn't wake up plotting our downfall, and they're most likely dealing with their own chaos and making a mess of it (as we all do from time to time).
Today's suggestion: When someone is difficult today (and it will probably happen before lunch) try treating it like an accidental elbow at the gym rather than a personal attack.
See if that changes anything.
Stay hungry. Stay wise. Eat brekkie.
