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Panic and anger cloud the mind; calmness and inner peace strengthen your perception.

A calm mind is the best weapon against whatever challenge you may be facing. Thomas Jefferson stated, “Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”

Of course, you are not in competition with other people when it comes to maintaining your inner peace and tranquility, but remaining calm under all circumstances will give you an advantage over every situation in which you may find yourself.

Confucius even took calmness one step further, stating “Lose your stillness, and you will fail in everything you do.” Think about it. If you lose your temper in a heated situation, it strengthens the other person’s point and makes you look weak, out-of-control, and foolish. Even if you lose your temper when you are working alone, it has consequences. It disrupts your inner peace and adds to your frustration and stress.

On the other hand, maintaining a calm attitude will strengthen your point, with the added benefit of making people see you as a rational, controlled person, especially when those around you are losing their cool. That calmness also increases the respect which others have for you. Remaining calm will have a positive effect on those around you and will even help them regain their composure. Your calm demeanor gives them confidence that things will be all right.

It also allows you a clearer perception of what is happening around you. Panic and anger cloud the mind; calmness and inner peace strengthen your perception. In every situation, it is to your advantage to remain calm and maintain your inner peace. Bohdi Sanders ~

But here is a pretty simple test we can apply most of the time—try not to do anything that, as Marcus Aurelius said, “requires walls or curtains.” If we’re inclined to hide it, we probably shouldn’t do it. If we dread the publicity, maybe we’re not living or doing right.

You Can’t Get Even
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Seneca was exiled on trumped up charges. The same thing happened to Rutilius Rufus. The same thing happened to Musonius Rufus…three separate times. These men—indeed all the Stoics—came to know what it meant to be hurt, to be wronged, to have something taken from them. What about Epictetus? He was thrown into slavery. What about Marcus Aurelius, who buried half his children? No one deserves something like that.

How do you get over it? How do you move on? You don’t. Not really.

In ​Lonesome Dove​, Gus McRae consoles a man who just had his friend and his stepson brutally murdered. “Son, this is a sad thing,” McRae says. “Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good…Don’t be trying to give back pain for pain. You can’t get even in business like this.” The Plains were a dark and lawless place, he was saying, the men who did this are evil in a way that you cannot possibly punish. This isn’t what we want to hear of course: We want permission to rage and to burn. We want to make the people responsible feel our pain. We want the world to feel our pain.

Yet the Stoics texts are replete with timeless warnings against this. Marcus Aurelius quotes a lost line from a play by Euripides: “Why should we be angry at the world? As if the world would notice.” Seneca ​in his essays on anger​ and in letters, compares revenge to returning a bite to a dog or a kick to a mule. They were accepting, in a way, the impotence of us fragile humans. Stuff happens to us. People do cruel things to each other. You can’t get even in a world like that. You’ll never beat them at that game—there are too many of them and they are worse than you can imagine.

But you know what you can do? How you can move on? How you can get revenge? The only way, Marcus Aurelius said, was to not be like that. To not let it ruin you, to not let it consume your life, ​to not let its inhumanity steal your humanity​.

COMMENTS

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Ravefox
22:06 May 02 2024

couldn't agree more my Lord :)

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