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 certainty that the door to God you just opened will not close on you is exactly the certainty Seneca was guarding his student against. He tells Lucilius to become intimate with poverty in the time of plenty, so that fortune may not catch him off his guard. The same training applies to spiritual fortune. Let yourself imagine, calmly, the dry season returning. The felt door narrowing again. The conviction thinning. Not as fear, but as preparation. The doors that have opened to you may close for a season or longer. Your steadiness should not be in your bet that they will not. Your steadiness should be in your preparation for what to do if they do.
heart
Picture, calmly, the dry season returning. Plan what you will do then. The picture loses its sting in the planning.
connection
You stand in the line of all who trained themselves in the good season for the dry one — the hermit who fasted on a feast day, the contemplative who kept a small portion of dryness in the time of consolation, Seneca himself who lived with the imagined exile he eventually had to live.
Action
Today, picture the dry season returning. Write down one rule you would keep in that season. File it. Read it again in three months.
Reference
let us become intimate with poverty, so that Fortune may not catch us off our guard
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic Ep. 18
practice
Training in the good season for the dry one
principle
The door's staying open is not the foundation; your preparation for it closing is
value
Calm imagination of dryness as preparation