November 1
A person's good lies in their own will — and so does their evil. Everything else is, at bottom, none of our concern.
Discourses (freely rendered)
Listening mode
A person's good lies in their own will — and so does their evil. Everything else is, at bottom, none of our concern.
Drawing a line between what is up to you and what is not seems at first like a relief. The train is cancelled, an application is turned down, someone misunderstands you. These are events, not verdicts on you. You may set them aside.
It gets harder when you draw the same line on a good day. The acceptance arrives, a piece of writing is well received, someone thanks you effusively. Much of this, too, lies outside your hands: who happened to be reading, what the mood was, who else was in the running. A line that holds only as long as it spares you is no line at all.
What remains then seems meagre. The care with which you wrote. Whether you were honest when it cost you something. There is little in that to celebrate, and it is rarely noticed.
Then again, no rejection letter can take it from you either. And when the next acceptance comes, you may be glad all the same, a little unreasonably, about something that doesn't entirely belong to you.
