January 18
Everything that happens is either bearable or unbearable. If it is bearable, bear it and stop grumbling. If it is unbearable, do not grumble either — it will end of its own accord. Only consider: much becomes bearable as soon as opinion calls it bearable.
Meditations X,3
Listening mode
Everything that happens is either bearable or unbearable. If it is bearable, bear it and stop grumbling. If it is unbearable, do not grumble either — it will end of its own accord. Only consider: much becomes bearable as soon as opinion calls it bearable.
A train stops in open country, and the announcement gives no time. Twenty minutes with notice you would have taken calmly. Ten minutes without drag on. What makes it hard then is less the waiting than the lack of a limit you could hold on to.
Much of what you call unbearable you are, at this very moment, already bearing. So the word rarely describes how much strength you actually have. Rather, it holds on to a fear: that it will stay like this, that it will get worse, that nobody will notice.
Sometimes you can examine this fear, and the burden grows lighter. But on the other side there is an uncomfortable confusion. Habit, too, makes things bearable. A noise, the tone in which someone speaks to you, a working day that is regularly too long: at some point it hardly bothers you any more. That can be equanimity. But it can also mean that you have quietly resigned yourself to something that could be changed.
Your grumbling may be a nuisance even to you. Whether without it you have grown calmer or merely quieter is hard to tell from the inside.
