“How appropriate that the gods put under our control only the most powerful ability that governs all the rest — the ability to make the right use of external appearances — and that they didn’t put anything else under our control. Was this simply because they weren’t willing to give us more? I think if it had been possible they would have given us more, but it was impossible.
EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 1.1.7-8
There’s a whole lot of things in life that aren’t in our control. Maybe we’d like to have control over them, but we don’t.
And we know, as stoics, that we’re supposed to let go of things that we can’t control… but it’s easier said than done.
Thankfully there is one thing we can control, the most powerful ability ever granted to us mere mortals. Epictetus spells it out for us in today’s page of The Daily Stoic: we have the ability to determine how we’re going to receive each day’s events.
We can’t control what other people are going to do, of course. And we can’t control how they’re going to receive things, or how they react to what we say.
But we can control how we’re going to react. We get to frame each event that happens to us. To use Ryan Holiday’s words, we have “the ability to decide what any event means” in the context of our lives.
That’s pretty powerful! If it were a superhero ability, it would be enough to make you invincible — like an ability to alter the very fabric of reality. And it is. Our own reality, anyway.
