At the height of his political career, Seneca suddenly ran afoul of the emperor. Perhaps his eloquence offended Claudius. Perhaps it was his political base that threatened him. Seneca was falsely accused of sleeping with Claudius' sister and exiled to the island of Corsica…just days after he buried his only child.
After decades of peace and prosperity and stability, the early days of Marcus Aurelius' reign were rocked by extraordinary and endless difficulties. A plague. Floods. Wars. An attempted coup. He too buried a child, then another and another and another and another.
Life comes at us fast. It does not stop. It hits us with everything, everywhere, all at once.
We cannot prevent this. We cannot hope to be skipped. All we can do is be ready, dug in as Marcus Aurelius said, like a wrestler, ready for sudden attacks. The unexpected blows, Seneca said, land heaviest, so we must anticipate them, we cannot be naive or lulled by false hopes. We have to prepare. We have to be ready to accept what happens, as Marcus said, just as we accept the orders of a doctor.
We will stagger under the weight of all this. We will struggle and break. All we can do, the Stoics tell us, as Hemingway wrote, is try to be strong in the broken places. To focus on how we respond, what we do about it, to who we can become for having gone through it.
P.S. "Amor Fati," or a love of one's fate, is the attitude long embraced by the Stoics to prepare for and embrace every moment in life, big or small, easy or difficult. "A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it," Marcus Aurelius wrote. We created the "Amor Fati" medallion as a reminder that we can make the best out of anything that happens to us. Grab yours today and remember—no matter how imposing or complex the challenge is, you got this!
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