You Need This Now More Than Ever

Come see me live in Austin and San Diego this year. ​Get your tickets here ​ . It’s ironic that the only thing we all seem to agree on lately is that there’s a lot to be angry about. This is what traditional media and social media both fuel…and then there is also the fact that reality itself is pretty awful. Our airports suck. Our politicians are cowards. Our systems are broken. Things are too expensive. Our environment is being ravaged. Horrible things are being done by people who seem to revel in the pain and anguish their actions cause. I mean, how could you not be pissed off? As they say, if you’re not outraged, “You’re not paying attention.” And actually, the fact that a lot of people aren’t paying attention is another thing to be mad about! Except…this is exactly the wrong response. To injustice. To inefficiencies. To broken systems. To frustrations. Because anger doesn’t make things better. It always makes things worse. If anger were something that made people better, do you think athletes would work so hard to get under the skin of their opponents? Do you think lawyers would try to attack and frustrate witnesses under cross-examination? Of course not. It is precisely because anger is blinding, because it makes us irrational, that one opponent uses it to undermine another. What we need — in sports, in life, in activism — is restraint, not rage. Oh, but that’s very privileged of you to say , one might think. You wouldn’t be so blasé if things were worse for you personally . History overwhelmingly disproves the idea that self-composure is a synonym for resignation. Think of Abraham Lincoln. A defining moment of his life came in 1841 when he, then no more than a successful Midwestern lawyer, saw a group of slaves chained together on a riverboat like “so many fish on a trotline.” Abolitionists had long witnessed such scenes and many became radicalized. Lincoln’s reaction was different — not anger, but a deep, profound sadness at the injustice. This was key. For all the abolitionist passion, it was Lincoln who spent the next two decades plotting political change that achieved what generations had failed to do. Unlike even the radicals, he never doubted the Union could be preserved, the war won. He steered the ship unswervingly through those terrible times, preaching understanding, forgiveness, and mutual culpability — even keeled in his determination to improve the world. The Women’s Rights Movement — while many of the suffragettes involved had blind spots, even abhorrent views about class or race — was defined by their remarkable ability to put aside differences and come together for the cause. “For the first time in the woman movement,” Carrie Chapman Catt would say at the opening of the seventh conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest in 1913, “it is expected that Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Mohammedan, Jewish and Christian women will sit together in a Congress uniting their voices in a common plea for the liberation of their sex from those artificial discriminations which every political and religious system has directed against them.” The Civil Rights Movement — per Martin Luther King’s leadership as well as the leadership of brave people like John Lewis — was defined not by anger, but by love. By a call to our better angels, not our worst ones. So was Gandhi’s. New to South Africa after a couple of frustrating years struggling to establish himself as a lawyer in India, Gandhi was humiliated at a Maritzburg train stop in 1893, thrown off a train because of his race. But it wasn’t anger that he stewed in as he sat there shivering in the cold waiting for a ride, it was something deeper, something he later referred to as the most profound spiritual experience of his life. “I began to think of my duty,” he wrote. “Should I fight for my rights or go back to India?…It would be cowardice to run back to India…The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial — only a symptom of the deep disease of color prejudice. I should try, if possible, to root out the disease.” There at that train station, in that moment of pausing to weigh his options, a floundering young lawyer made the choice that would turn him into the crusader who changed the world. It’s not that things aren’t awful. It’s not that things aren’t outrageous. It’s not that you should simply accept the injustices and the cruelty that are happening all around you. As ​we often talk about over at Daily Stoic​ , to think that this is what the Stoics would advise is to miss who they were and what they did. Cato fought valiantly, selflessly in the hopes of preserving the Roman Republic. George Washington fought valiantly, selflessly in the hopes of forming one. Epictetus and Musonius Rufus were exiled for their transgressive teachings. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the translator of Epictetus, led black troops for the Union in the Civil War. The Stoics were involved in public life, they were involved in important causes, they lived in a scary world where outrageous things happened on a daily basis. And it is precisely for this reason that the Stoics cultivated poise and restraint and self-command. Because the outrages and injustices of their time demanded it. Not apathy, but the ability to step back and be objective, to be strategic, to be diplomatic, to not despair or scream or alienate. In fact, Washington’s favorite expression, borrowing from a play about Cato, draws on this idea, that we must be able to look at everything “in the calm light of mild philosophy.” It was in the calm and mild light that Washington approached the news that one of his generals was slandering him behind his back. It was in the calm and mild light that Washington dealt with the saddening realization that he and his wife could not have children. It was in the calm and mild light that Washington approached a mob-like meeting of his officers who threatened mutiny against the new American government, slowly, masterfully, talking them back from treason. In June 1797 alone, Washington wrote this reminder in three separate letters, trying to stop himself from rushing to judgment or losing control of his emotions and instead looking at the situation with the temperament befitting the father of a country . Washington refused to get upset, he refused to get angry — no matter the insult, no matter the injustice, no matter the betrayal. And it was precisely this self-control that allowed him to direct his efforts towards his great task — freeing a colonial people from the subjugation of a capitalistic imperial empire, to put it in modern language — so it cannot be argued that he simply tolerated the status quo. Like the rest of us, this was not his natural disposition. He was not exempt, a friend said, from the “tumultuous passions which accompany greatness, and frequently tarnish its luster.” Fighting them was the first and longest battle of his life — and, as another friend said in his eulogy, his greatest victory: “so great the empire he had there acquired, that calmness of manner and of conduct distinguished him through life.” As Washington’s great biographer ​Ron Chernow told me on the Daily Stoic podcast​ , “He wanted to see things through the calm light of mild philosophy — it was always an ideal. It was not something that was easy to achieve. And occasionally, his self-command would break down. But he imagined that he had to embody the nation and had to live up to a certain ideal of courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. That became a description of George Washington, but again, this was something earned, something achieved, over many years.” Washington wasn’t naturally Stoic; he made himself this way. Not permanently but anew every minute, every day, in every situation, as best he could. He had the initial reactions we all do, but he tried to put every situation up for a kind of review, searching for a better light to explain and understand it. We need this view more than ever today, especially if we hope to change things for the better. We can’t fly off the handle. We can’t say everything we think. We can’t give in to those initial feelings of disgust, rage, contempt, or resentment. No, we must do as the Stoic Athenodorus told the emperor Augustus — something he wanted him to follow always. “Whenever you feel yourself getting angry, Caesar,” he instructed, “don’t say or do anything until you’ve repeated the twenty-four letters of the alphabet to yourself.” Or try the principle that artist Marina Abramović lays down in her book ​Walk Through Walls ​ . “If you get angry,” she writes, “stop breathing and hold your breath until you can’t hold it anymore, then inhale fresh air.” We know that between every stimulus and its response, every piece of information and our decision, there is space, one with room enough to insert our philosophy. Will we use it? Use it to think, use it to examine, use it to wait for more information? Or will we give in to first impressions, to harmful instincts, and old patterns? The pause is everything. The one before . . . . . . jumping to conclusions . . . prejudging . . . assuming the worst . . . rushing to solve your children’s problems for them (or put them back to sleep) . . . forcing a problem into some kind of box . . . assigning blame . . . taking offense . . . turning away in fear. It is a brief space, to be sure, but in it lie the choices that shape the course of events in our own and each other’s lives. Using that all-important space to respond isn’t easy. As I said above, this is not something that comes naturally to most of us. It’s a discipline, something one gets better at through practice and repetition. To get better at this in my own life, as a kind of tool to strengthen my own practice of using the space between stimulus and response, ​I carry this coin in my pocket​ . One side reads DELAY IS THE REMEDY (a nod to Seneca’s line, “The greatest remedy for anger is delay”), which is encircled by the 24 letters of the alphabet (a reminder of Athenodorus’ advice to silently run through them before reacting in heated moments). The reverse is a polished, mirror-like surface, inspired by Seneca’s suggestion to look at oneself when gripped by anger — not only because the sight of our own unflattering reflection can be jarring enough to prevent an unflattering response, but also because “whoever comes to a mirror to change himself has already changed.” Encircling the mirror are the words Pausa et Reflecte , Latin for pause and reflect. Today, as people throughout history always have, we face — individually and collectively — problems and injustices that are complex and urgent. Which requires that we bring our best, calmest, most focused selves to them. We don’t want to hand our enemies extra ammunition. We don’t want to make things worse. We don’t want to widen divides and deepen hostility. Instead, we must meet these problems and injustices with precisely the opposite traits of those that created them in the first place. Like Lincoln, Gandhi, Washington, the leaders of the Women’s Rights and Civil Rights Movements, we must meet cruelty with compassion, hardship with courage, provocation with self-control, and injustice with the calm, mild determination to improve things. Whether it’s a triggering post on social media or a costly mistake at work, an obvious lie someone tried to deceive us with, an insubordinate employee, a difficult obstacle, a casual insensitivity, or a complex problem — everything must be met with a measured and mellow eye. We can’t make decisions on impulse. Again, that’s not to say we won’t have impulses. It’s that we must be disciplined enough not to act on them. Not until we’ve paused and reflected. Not until we’ve counted the letters of the alphabet, inhaled fresh air, and looked in the mirror. Not until we’ve sat for a bit in the space between stimulus and response. Not until we’ve put things under or in the calm light of mild philosophy.