joy · you feel certain you will keep a thing · relationships · children
what you just named
You came in joy, not pain: that you feel certain you will keep a thing, in your relationships — specifically with children — and you reached for the Stoic voice first. That's what you've named. Listen now to what it answers.
- Stoic
Spirit
mind
The certainty is honest if it is the certainty of daily practice, not of feeling. Epictetus's instruction is the prescription for keeping the thing you intend to keep: immediately prescribe some character and some form to yourself, which you shall observe both when you are alone and when you meet with men. The father you intend to be is a character you prescribe and observe — alone (in your own mind, in your own choices when no one is watching) and in company (with your child, with your wife, with the family). The certainty stays alive in the observing. Not in the saying. In the daily small acts of being that father, in private and in public.
heart
Prescribe the father you intend to be in one sentence. Observe him today. Observe him tomorrow.
connection
You stand in the line of every father who chose a different character than the one he was given and kept choosing it for forty years — the man whose fatherhood was a prescription he renewed every day.
Action
Today, write down in one sentence the kind of father you intend to be. Read it once in the morning and once at night. Keep doing this for seven days.
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
Prescribing and observing the father-character daily, alone and in company
principle
The cycle is broken by a prescribed character kept through daily observation, not by certainty about the future
value
Daily prescription over confident retirement of the old pattern