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As Hamilton lay in the hospital recovering, she considered her options. She concluded that her surfing days were over: how can you surf with only one arm? Perhaps she would become a surf photographer, or maybe she would switch to soccer, a sport in which arms play a minor role. Shortly thereafter, though, she decided it was too early to give up on surfing. Her doctor was encouraging. He explained that although the list of things she would have to do differently was very long, the list of things she couldn’t do was short.
After a few falls, she successfully rode a wave and thereby silenced the voice of doubt in her mind that had insisted she would never surf again. She celebrated this triumph by shedding tears of joy.
“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
When the number of options available is limited, it is foolish to fuss and fret. We should instead simply choose the best of them and get on with life. To behave otherwise is to waste precious time and energy.
A resilient person will refuse to play the role of victim. To play this role is to invite pity, and she doesn’t regard herself as a pitiful being. She is strong and capable. She may not be able to control whether she is a target of injustice, but she has considerable control over how she responds to being targeted. She can let it ruin her day and possibly her life, or she can respond to it bravely, remaining upbeat while she looks for workarounds to the obstacles that people have wrongly placed in her path.
BY THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, many adults were willing to play the role of victim. At the same time, many children were being raised to believe that they should not and could not, on their own, rise to the challenges that life would likely present. On the advice of psychologists, parents of the 1990s and 2000s worked hard to give their children setback-free childhoods. They supervised their children’s play to prevent mishaps, and when accidents nevertheless happened, they cleaned up the resulting messes rather than expecting their children to do so. Likewise, when disputes arose among
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your subconscious mind tends to treat life’s setbacks as undeserved tribulations. It therefore tries to convince you that you have been wronged. Shortly thereafter—unless you take steps to prevent it—your emotions will rise in support of your subconscious mind’s interpretation of events.
the Stoic test strategy. To employ it, we assume that the setbacks we experience are not simply undeserved tribulations but tests of our ingenuity and resilience, administered by imaginary Stoic gods. To pass these tests, we must not only come up with effective workarounds to setbacks but must also, while doing so, avoid the onset of negative emotions.
wrong is done that matters, but how it is taken”4—as did Marcus Aurelius: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
When someone wrongs you, keep in mind Seneca’s comment that “laughter, and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!”
if you can bring yourself to laugh at the things that make most people cry, you have a powerful weapon to use against life’s adversities.
By framing a setback as a component of a game, we can dramatically reduce its emotional impact.
when confronted by a setback, the Stoics say, we should pretend that imaginary Stoic gods are testing us with our well-being in mind. To pass this test—and thereby win the game—we must stay calm while finding a workaround for the setback.
by employing the Stoic test frame, we can interpret setbacks as interesting challenges, thereby deriving a degree of satisfaction from dealing with them.
“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”
