The Enchiridion By Epictetus
Translated by Elizabeth Carter
5. Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible.
Instincts get in our way, in other words. The primal reptile part of the brain has some uses. But letting that primitive part of you be in charge should be a conscious decision. We humans fall into a trap of slipping easily into a panic, addicted to our own adrenaline and relying on anxiety and fear to get that fight or flight instinct going. Instead, be fully human and use all of your brain, not just the primitive parts of it.
Fear of death is a good example. Our reptile brain instinctively wants to flee from danger and fears pain and death. But pain is a part of being alive and death is how all life ends eventually. Fear of pain and death and the resulting panic can often get in the way of avoiding what we were afraid of in the first place. Also there are times we have to feel pain and face death to accomplish a goal. The goal is what matters, not primitive instinct.
When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself.
Humans are very quick to reach for a blame-thrower to devastate the opposition. Much of life is random fortune, with no particular person at fault. Also most people aren't truly rational or in control of their own actions, and blaming them for the results of their actions is like being angry at the deer that leaped in front of your car on a dark night ruining your fender. Blame doesn't solve the problem at hand, and assigning it gets in the way of solutions.
6. Don't be prideful with any excellence that is not your own. If a horse should be prideful and say, " I am handsome," it would be supportable. But when you are prideful, and say, " I have a handsome horse," know that you are proud of what is, in fact, only the good of the horse. What, then, is your own? Only your reaction to the appearances of things. Thus, when you behave conformably to nature in reaction to how things appear, you will be proud with reason; for you will take pride in some good of your own.
Apply this to everything. If you can't spread the blame, you can't steal the credit either. Either way, it is a distraction from what you should be doing at the moment.
Don't sit around blaming someone who "did wrong" twenty years ago as an excuse to do nothing BUT sit around and complain. Don't sit around proud of your local sports team as an excuse to never do anything about your own fitness. You are what you do. So DO SOMETHING. Mainly, become a stoic.
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