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#6 Stoic practice: premeditation of future adversity
This series of articles is my feedback on A Handbook for New Stoics, a book on the practice of Stoicism, by Massimo Pigliucci and Gregory Lopez. For one year, every week, I will experience the Stoic practices proposed by the handbook and I will share with you my weekly review. This will provide you with an overview of the different Stoic exercises and the benefits (or not) they can offer you.
💬 The quote (Seneca)
If an evil has been pondered beforehand, the blow is gentle when it comes. To the fool, however, and to him who trusts in fortune, each event as it arrives ‘comes in a new and sudden form’, and a large part of evil, to the inexperienced, consists in its novelty. This is proved by the fact that men endure with greater courage, when they have once become accustomed to them, the things which they had first regarded as hardships. Hence, the wise man accustoms himself to coming trouble, lightening by long reflection the evils which others lighten by long endurance. We sometimes hear the inexperienced say: ‘I knew that this was in store for me.’ But the wise man knows that all things are in store for him. Whatever happens, he says: ‘I knew it’.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 76.34–35
