joy · you feel certain you will keep a thing · relationships · God
what you just named
You came in joy, not pain: that you feel certain you will keep a thing, in your relationships — specifically with God — and you reached for the Stoic voice first. That's what you've named. Listen now to what it answers.
- Stoic
Spirit
mind
The feeling of certainty is a poor footing for any long thing. Epictetus does not promise his student that the disposition will hold; he tells him to prescribe a character now and observe it both when alone and when meeting with others. The constancy you trust should not be a feeling about the future. It should be a daily form you keep — the practice that holds you when the feeling does not. Many men who were sure their faith would hold for life let it slip in the years when the feeling first thinned. The ones who held it kept the form when the feeling went.
heart
The faith will not hold because you feel it will. It will hold because you keep the form when the feeling thins. Trust the form, not the feeling.
connection
You stand in the line of all who learned this the hard way — the monk who kept the hours through dryness, the husband who kept the vow through cold years. None of them stayed by feeling; each of them stayed by form.
Action
Today, write down two daily acts you will keep this year regardless of how you feel. Put the page where you will see it tomorrow morning.
Reference
Immediately prescribe some character and some form to yourself, which you shall observe both when you are alone and when you meet with men.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 33
practice
Settling on a daily form to keep through dryness
principle
Form holds when feeling thins — the constancy lives in the discipline, not the certainty
value
Character over confidence in the weather of the soul