Most of our mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering come from the violent collision between our expectations and reality. As we dust ourselves off amid the rubble, bruised and indignant, we further pain ourselves with staggering emotional energy on outrage at how reality dared defy what we demanded.
The remedy, of course, is not to bend the reality of an impartial universe to our will. The treatment is to calibrate our expectations — a medication that might feel far too pragmatic to be within reach in the heat of the collision moment but also one with deep poetic undertones once put into practice.
When felled by a paralytic stroke, Walt Whitman understood this. He considered what makes life worth living and instructed himself: “Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and mere daylight and the skies.” He spared himself the additional self-inflicted suffering of outrage at how his Body failed him — perhaps because, having proclaimed himself the poet of the Body and the poet of the Soul; he understood the two to be one. He squandered no emotional energy on the expectation that his suddenly disabled Body perform a possible counter feat against reality to let him enjoy his beloved tree workouts and daily excursions to the river. He edited his expectations to accord with his new reality and sought to find his joy within these new parameters of being.
What is true of the poetics of our body-soul is as accurate of the poetics of relationship, that beautiful and terrifying interchange between separate body-souls. Little siphons the joy of life more surely than the wasted energy of anger at how others have failed to behave by what we expected of them.
Two millennia before the outrage culture of the Internet, the lovesick queer teenager turned Roman emperor. Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) addressed this curious self-mauling tendency of the human mind with his characteristic precision of insight and unsentimental problem-solving in the notebooks that became his Meditations (public library) — a timeless book, newly translated and annotated by the British classics scholar Robin Waterfield, which Marcus Aurelius wrote essentially for and to himself like Tolstoy wrote his Calendar of Wisdom and Bruce Lee calibrated his core values, yet a book that went on to stake the pillars of the philosophical system of Stoicism, equipping countless generations with tools for navigating the fundamental existential challenges of being human and inspiring others to fill the gaps of its unaddressed questions with exquisite answers of their own.
Epochs before the birth of probability theory, Marcus Aurelius begins with a probabilistic-statistical consolation:
Whenever a person’s lack of shame offends you, you should immediately ask yourself, “So, is it possible for there to be no shameless people in the world?” It isn’t, and you should therefore stop demanding the impossible. He’s just one of those shameless people who must necessarily exist in the world. It would help if you kept the same thought readily available when faced with devious and untrustworthy people who are flawed. As soon as you remind yourself that it’s impossible for such people not to exist, you’ll be kinder to every one of them. It’s also helpful immediately to consider what virtue nature has granted us human beings to deal with any given offense — gentleness, for instance, to counter discourteous people…
Millennia before William James lit the dawn of modern psychology with the radical assertion that our experience is what we “agree to attend to,” millennia before neuroscience came to locate the seat of consciousness in the qualia of subjective experience, Marcus Aurelius serves that classic Stoic cocktail of worded obvious truths that are brutal truths to live up to, earned by a thousand complexities of conduct to be practiced daily:
The things of the world cannot affect the Soul; they lie inert outside it, and only internal beliefs disturb it.
From this follows a curious, infuriating fundament of our humanity: that no matter what another person does — to us or at us or near the self-membraned bubble of our being — our inner response to it lives in the realm of feeling, that sovereign source of light over which we alone have agency and dominion. Even more infuriatingly, Marcus Aurelius reminds us our outrage at some entirely predictable misbehavior by a person known to misbehave is a failure not of the other but our powers of reason:
You’ll find that none of the people who make you lose your temper has done anything that might affect your mind for the worse, and outside of the reason, there’s nothing truly detrimental or harmful for you… After all, you even had the resources, in the form oSoulur’s ability to think rationally, to appreciate that he was likely to commit that fault. Yet, you forgot it and are now surprised that he did that.
Observing that to explode with rage at the offender would make no positive difference to their conduct and would only further perturb your Soul, he instead offers a two-step process for dealing with the situation, telescoping into the broad existential perspective and then microscopic into your innermost values:
First, don’t be upset. Nothing happens that isn’t in accord with universal nature, and before long, you won’t exist, just like [your heroes]… Second, fix your gaze on the matter at hand and see it for what it is, and then, keeping in your mind your obligation to be a good man and the demands of your humanity, go right ahead and do it in the way that seems to you to be most just. But do it with kindness and modesty and without hypocrisy.
This is but one manifestation of the central preoccupation of the Meditations — the lifelong project of learning to see clearly as the most excellent self-defense against mental anguish. So much of our disappointment and rage, after all, stem from the clash between our misperceptions of things and the reality of things — they are the pain of disillusionment, inflamed in those moments when the veil of illusion is lifted or violently pierced to let us, finally, see reality.
