July 31
Endure the presence of pain, and you will see: it has a measure. What makes it unbearable is only the thought that it is beyond measure.
Letters to Lucilius, Letter 78 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Endure the presence of pain, and you will see: it has a measure. What makes it unbearable is only the thought that it is beyond measure.
At twenty to four in the morning you start doing the sums. If you fall asleep now, you'll get just under three hours. If not, the morning will drag, and the meeting at ten even more so. With every sum it gets harder to fall asleep, and the tiredness, which right now would be perfectly bearable, takes on the weight of a day that hasn't even begun.
The sums aren't wrong. The morning really will drag. But they add up something that never reaches you all at once. You won't live through the meeting at four in the morning but at ten, with coffee, with breaks, with moments when you forget the tiredness. The total, on the other hand, lies on you in full, right now.
With heavier things this becomes delicate. Some things don't end any time soon, and the advice to take only the moment at hand easily underestimates how long the series can be. Even so, there remains a difference between what lasts and what you are carrying right now.
At twelve minutes past four you look at the clock again. You haven't slept. The half hour has passed all the same, minute by minute, and you didn't have to find the strength for any of them in advance.
