Seneca wrote about premeditatio malorum, the deliberate meditation on the evils that we might encounter. “Exile, war, torture, shipwreck,” Seneca said, “all the terms of the human condition could be on our minds.” Not in the form of fear, but in that of familiarity. How likely are they? What might cause them? How have we prepared ourselves to handle them? For Seneca, the unexpected blows land most heavily and painfully. So by expecting, by defining, by wrestling with what can happen, we are making it less scary and less dangerous at the same time.
