January 5
It is in your power to hold no opinion about anything and to keep your soul untroubled. For things themselves have no power to compel our judgements.
Meditations VI,52
Listening mode
It is in your power to hold no opinion about anything and to keep your soul untroubled. For things themselves have no power to compel our judgements.
Someone casually calls you “idiosyncratic” and then moves on to something else. The word sticks. It might have been appreciation, a faint reproach or simply a description. The tone gave no sure way of telling.
What is striking is how quickly you settle on a meaning anyway. The interpretation is often there before you have even asked yourself which one it should be. Often it turns out less kind than the occasion warrants. An unpleasant certainty seems easier to bear than a word left hanging open in the air.
Yet this quick choice reveals little about the remark and a good deal about what you were braced for. The word did not dictate a meaning to you. It only touched a spot where a judgement was already waiting.
Staying undecided, though, is not a comfortable state. At first it feels less like calm than like having no cover, because there is no answer available for you to settle into. Perhaps you will ask later what was meant. Perhaps not, and it will remain one of those words you never quite translated.
