July 3
It is not the one who reviles or strikes you who mistreats you — but your opinion that he is mistreating you. When someone provokes you, know this: your own view has provoked you. Therefore, above all, do not let yourself be carried away by the impression — if you gain time and delay, you will more easily become master of yourself.
Enchiridion, 20
Listening mode
It is not the one who reviles or strikes you who mistreats you — but your opinion that he is mistreating you. When someone provokes you, know this: your own view has provoked you. Therefore, above all, do not let yourself be carried away by the impression — if you gain time and delay, you will more easily become master of yourself.
A long, careful message gets a two-word reply. Before you have even finished reading it, a third sentence is already there inside you, one nobody wrote: that someone wants to show you how little you mean to them.
This sentence is quick, and it doesn't feel like an interpretation but like perception. That is exactly where its power lies. What you added fuses with what is there on the page, and the hurt seems to come from the screen.
If you read the reply again the next morning, it may look different: brief, tired, perhaps typed between two appointments. But it may also stay just as cool. The delay doesn't decide whether you were wronged. It only separates what the other person did from what you believed about yourself in that same second.
The second was often the more painful. And it was already waiting before the message came.
Other versions
