earlier in The Meditations, Marcus paraphrased the same quote from Epicurus as follows: “On pain: if it is unbearable, it carries us off, if it persists, it can be endured.”12 The point is that chronic pain beyond our ability to endure would have killed us, so the fact we’re still standing proves that we’re capable of enduring much worse. Although this can be hard for some people to accept, participants in my online courses who have suffered for many years with chronic pain have reported that this Epicurean maxim has been a great help to them,
