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Better to take back the hour and use it as your nature demands. You've rested enough. Time now to take a deep breath and get on with living your life.
To get a more objective perspective, it’s often helpful to take a step back and view your obstacles as if you were a disinterested, but sympathetic, 3rd party.
Only your opinions, pursuits, desires, aversions, and actions are within your control. Nothing outside your control matters in your pursuit of peace. * Nothing that happens to you can hurt you unless you choose to be hurt. It is only your own opinions of events that cause you to be disturbed. * Change is natural and inevitable. You might as well get angry at the rain as be disturbed by change. * Momento mori. The clock is ticking. What is the very next thing you will do to start moving in the right direction?
Your purpose in life is not to consume the best of all things. Yours is to achieve arete' - fulfillment through excellence of character.
The judgment adds nothing but unhelpful emotion. See the world as it is and work from that.
Eudemonia, that sense of fulfillment, of flourishing, that we all seek, is not something that someone else can give to us. It comes only from our own actions and judgments. It is the natural reward for virtuous acts - for living up to our standards and acting according to the values we hold dear. It is ours to have, at will, if we so choose to. We need only live our lives with as much wisdom as we can muster.
If you want happiness, you must stop looking for it in other people. Set your own standards for excellence and strive to meet them. There is nothing anyone else on the planet can do to help you reach that goal. And it's the only one that matters.
And yet, if our mind is always on the next thing, then it is never on what we are actually doing. And if our mind is not engaged in the only moment where we exist, this one, then we might as well have never existed. We were never "there".
Your only concern is to improve the faults within yourself. The only interest you should take in the “faults” of others is to see if there is in them some lesson for you.
Anything done according to your values is worth doing openly. Perhaps others will see your example and learn from it. Perhaps your skin will grow a little thicker. And anything that must be done in secret is better not done at all. If an act is both a vice and an embarrassment, there is simply no justification for it.
When faced with an impression of wrongdoing, consider the possibility that it’s just your perspective that makes it appear so. What if there is more to the situation than is initially apparent? What if there are extenuating circumstances?
