pain · you feel you may never gain a thing · relationships · children
what you just named
You came in pain, not joy: that you feel you may never gain 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 cycle is held in place by which handle you take it by. Epictetus's image is precise: if your brother acts unjustly, do not lay hold of the act by that handle wherein he acts unjustly, for this is the handle which cannot be borne; but lay hold of the other, that he is your brother, that he was nurtured with you. The handle works for fathers as it works for brothers. Your own father's failures have a handle — the handle of what he did and didn't do — that cannot be borne, and that handle is what perpetuates the cycle. The other handle is that he was a man, formed by what formed him, doing what he could see how to do. The breaking of the cycle is the daily choice of which handle you reach for, in your father, and in yourself when you become him in a small moment.
heart
Pick up your father by the other handle. The cycle breaks one handle-grab at a time.
connection
You stand in the line of every man who refused the unbearable handle and picked up his father by the bearable one — every man who broke the cycle by deciding which version of his father to carry forward.
Action
Today, when you notice your father's pattern in yourself with your child, do not lay hold of it by what your father did. Lay hold of it by what you can do differently in the next ten seconds.
Reference
If your brother acts unjustly, do not lay hold of the act by that handle wherein he acts unjustly, for this is the handle which cannot be borne; but lay hold of the other, that he is your brother, that he was nurtured with you
Epictetus, Enchiridion 43
practice
Picking up the next moment by the bearable handle, daily
principle
The cycle is held in place by which handle you take it by; the choice is yours each time
value
Bearable handles over inherited grievance