Seneca’s heartfelt advice to a hurting friend.
Life is no easy matter. Wherever you are right now, and wherever you’re going, there will be hardship.
There will be pain. There will be suffering. There will be loss. There will be times when the urge to give up is almost overwhelming. There will be nights when you can’t sleep, and toss about for hours. . . and mornings where you wish you could stay in bed and not face the world.
This is our destiny — to venture into the darkness, in search of light.
Life is no easy matter, especially when you make the choice to live life on your own terms — to strive for your dreams and excellence. The path that we’re both on will exact a toll for its treasures.
And that’s alright.
Pain, hardship, difficulty — inevitable. What we can choose, and control, is how we perceive and tackle it.
This matter was as relevant thousands of years ago as it is today, and I find that I go back to those times, to the lessons and wisdom from ages ago, in order to renew my mind and my courage against the enemies I face — especially the enemies that are within myself.
We must conquer the world within ourselves before we can conquer life’s battles.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman statesman and philosopher, had his fair share of these trials, and in his famous letters to his dear friend, Lucilius, he exemplifies a way of handling the darkness we must necessarily face in order to live this life well.
I need these lessons just as much as you do. Let’s learn from them together.
Hardship is Inevitable
“Let the personality be made ready to face everything; let it be made to realize that it has come to terrain on which thunder and lightning play.”
Seneca
Seneca’s first advice to his friend is to anticipate that times will get hard, to expect that life will not be roses and feathery cushions. The sooner we accept this, as Seneca says, the better we are able to handle it when it arises.
Not with excess surprise and dismay and panic, but with courage.
Not, “Oh my god I can’t believe this is happening!”
But, “I’ve been expecting you.”
Hardship, as Seneca writes, finds us no matter where we are, and often when we don’t expect it:
“No moment is exempt: in the midst of pleasures there are found the springs of suffering. In the middle of peace war rears its head, and the bulwarks of one’s security are transformed into sources of alarm, friend turning foe and ally turning enemy. The summer’s calm is upset by sudden storms more severe than those of winter. In the absence of any enemy we suffer all that an enemy might wreak on us.” — Seneca
In all times suffering may come. An accident may happen. Some catastrophe may come about. This isn’t being pessimistic, it’s simply accepting that none of us is guaranteed the morrow, let alone easy, trouble-free day, week, or month.
What do we gain by being ignorant of life’s suffering? Perhaps some bliss. But in not expecting pain, pain hurts all the more when it comes.
“Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it.” — Seneca
That is why Seneca admonishes Lucilius to envision the possible happenings that may come, to mentally prepare himself for life’s troubles. Not to the point of being sick, not to the point of being negative and pessimistic, but to the point of acceptance of whatever may come — and the resultant resolve to handle it.
We must learn to accept that suffering is inevitable — and then, anticipate it in a healthy way. To be ready to face what may come.
When we know suffering will come, and anticipate the forms it may take — the pangs of age, the burn of rejection, the hurts of love, the difficult early mornings, the tolling of the late hours, the ache of muscles after a day’s labor, the freshly-turned earth at that person’s grave, and all the other things you know will likely come and not be pleasant — when we do this, here’s what happens:
We are stronger when they do happen.
“Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings.” — Seneca
While it is impossible to be completely ready for everything, we can still have a general idea and a resilient mindset — and resilient mindset, as Gustavo Razzetti writes, is one of the best things we can count on. When pain itself becomes familiar, not alien, pain will not find us an easy target.
“Since it is invariably unfamiliarity that makes a thing more formidable than it really is, this habit of continual reflection will ensure that no form of adversity finds you a complete beginner.” — Seneca
Let no form of adversity find us as beginners either. Let it find us prepared in some way to handle it — not perfectly, but enough.
Part of this comes from accepting the suffering itself.
Acceptance
Since suffering will come, what then?
Learn to accept that too.
To accept the nature of life, both its joys and its pains. Life is not a simple, clean business. In order to live, we must pull up our sleeves and get dirty, set our jaws against bruises, and not let the bad things that happen fool us into believing that it’s better to give up.
As Seneca writes, we can’t expect anything less:
“One has to accept life . . . Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you. Life’s no soft affair. It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired, and openly wish — a lie — for death.” — Seneca
At a time when he was comforting his friend for his loss of a friend, Seneca brings to light how life’s pains are no greater shown than in the bittersweet nature of our relationships with others:
“At one place you will part from a companion, at another bury one, and be afraid of one at another. These are the kind of things you’ll come up against all along this rugged journey.” — Seneca
Acceptance is at the heart of handling anything, for nothing can be handled unless we first bring ourselves to bear on it, focus, and see it for what it really is — and how can we do so if we only try to run away from it?
Accept suffering — it’s not the end of things.
You’re Not Alone
Of this one thing be certain when you are suffering: You are not alone.
I suffer. You suffer. We all suffer. Not a single person in this world goes through life unscathed — and many, perhaps people you pass on the street on the regular, have been through more than you can imagine.
What happens when we isolate ourselves in our suffering? We feel like we’re not understood, that we’re victims, that life is picking favourites and we’re on the wrong end of it! It’s so tempting to feel this way as an excuse to be in despair — but it’s not true.
Odds are someone else has faced a similar adversity to the one you’re facing now, be it today or a thousand years ago. And if they faced it, so can you.
“Others have been plundered, incriminated, set up, betrayed, beaten up, attacked with poison or with calumny — mention anything you like, it has happened to plenty of people.” — Seneca
In the end, we don’t need to feel singled out by life’s pains, and neither do we need to feel alone. As Seneca saw it, we are all born to these things, and what may happen to one person may happen to us all:
“Let’s not be taken aback by any of the things we’re born to, things no one need complain at for the simple reason that they’re the same for everybody. Yes, the same for everybody; for even if a man does escape something, it was a thing which he might have suffered. The fairness of a law does not consist in its effect being actually felt by all alike, but in its having been laid down for all alike.” — Seneca
When we suffer, we’re not alone.
When adversity rises, it’s not because it was some special gift reserved for us alone — it may have happened to just about anyone, and indeed has happened to many people before.
Suffering Well
Adversity will find us indeed. It is part of life’s journey, a price to be paid for the gift of drawing breath in his beautiful, ever-changing world:
“Winter brings in the cold, and we have to shiver; summer brings back the heat and we have to swelter. Bad weather tries the health we have to be ill. Somewhere or other we are going to have encounters with wild beasts, and with man, too — more dangerous than all those beasts. Floods will rob us of one thing, fire another. These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change.” — Seneca
With suffering being part of life. With adversity being a universal trial. With life giving and taking with no regard for who we are. How are we to stand?
When hurt is inevitable. When pain will come. When hardship will test you.
When doubt will assail you. When living will become an act of courage in itself. What are we to do?
We can choose to be brave.
When we choose the path of courage, we can choose to bear our suffering well. This is, as Seneca called it, facing life with a noble spirit:
“What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good man, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills in tune with nature’s . . .”
And when we do this, there follows light. For as all things are temporary, so too are these hard times. Our world is made of comings and goings.
“Reversals, after all, are the means by which nature regulates this visible realm of hers: clear skies follow cloudy; after the calm comes the storm; the winds take turns to blow; day succeeds night; while part of the heavens is in the ascendant, another is sinking. It is by means of opposites that eternity endures.”
So take comfort in the transience of all things, even pain.
This will pass. It will end. Take courage, have heart, you will make it through.
Facing Life With Courage
You have courage within you. We all do.
Far more courage than we can ever imagine.
Seneca likens the courageous bearing of life’s troubles to the discipline of a soldier:
“It is a poor soldier that follows his commander grumbling. So let us receive our orders readily and cheerfully, and not desert the ranks along the march — the march of this glorious fabric of creation in which everything we shall suffer is a strand.”
He brings to mind the words of Cleanthes, the Greek stoic philosopher, who voiced his acceptance of the uncontrollable winds of misfortune and his resolve to not bemoan his lot, but live with it, handle it, and make use of it, with courage:
“Lead me, Master of the soaring vault,
Of Heaven, lead me, Father, where you will.
I stand here prompt and eager to obey.
And ev’n suppose I were unwilling, still
I should attend you and know suffering.
Dishonorably and grumbling, when I might
Have done so and been good as well. For Fate
The willing leads, the unwilling drags along.”
We can choose to show courage in the face of hard times, or we can be poor about them — that won’t change whether hard times come.
Life still goes on unaffected by our unwillingness to accept its barbs.
Let us choose to stop trying to reject life’s pain and instead live courageously:
“Let us speak and live like that. Let fate find us ready and eager. Here is your noble spirit — the one which has put itself in the hands of fate; on the other side we have the puny degenerate spirit which struggles, and which sees nothing right in the way the universe is ordered, and would rather reform the gods than reform itself.” — Seneca
We can’t always change what happens, we can’t always change others, but we can, and always shall be able to, change ourselves.
In the face of suffering, you can be strong. In the face of adversity, you can be brave.
When hard times rise, you can rise to meet them. When tears are shed, you can still find cause to smile. When hope seems lost, you can still have the courage to find it again.
You can make it, provided you choose to be able to.