joy · you feel certain you will keep a thing · relationships · self
what you just named
You came in joy, not pain: that you feel certain you will keep a thing, in your relationships — specifically with self — and you reached for the Stoic voice first. That's what you've named. Listen now to what it answers.
- Stoic
Spirit
mind
The inner work holds because you do it. Marcus's brief instruction to himself: wipe out imagination: check desire: extinguish appetite: keep the ruling faculty in its own power. Four daily acts. None of them is the confidence that the work will hold. The work holds because the four acts are done today, and again tomorrow, and again the day after. The faculty in its own power is the result of the daily keeping, not the cause. Trust the doing of the acts, not the feeling about whether they are working. The feeling will lie before the practice does.
heart
Do the four acts today. The holding is in the doing, not in the certainty.
connection
You stand in the line of all who held by doing — the old monk whose practice was daily, the recovered who counted days because the counting kept the doing happening, every man who knew the work was the work and stopped checking whether it was working.
Action
Today, name the four acts you do that keep the ruling faculty in its own power. Do each one once. Do not check whether the work is holding. Just do the work.
Reference
Wipe out imagination: check desire: extinguish appetite: keep the ruling faculty in its own power.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.29
practice
Doing the four daily acts; trusting the doing, not the feeling
principle
The work holds because the work is done; the holding is daily
value
Daily acts over confidence