December 8
Wipe out the impression. Check the impulse. Quench the desire. Keep your ruling self in your own power.
Meditations IX,7
Listening mode
Wipe out the impression. Check the impulse. Quench the desire. Keep your ruling self in your own power.
Sometimes you hold back and afterwards aren't quite sure who it was that actually put on the brakes. In a meeting a sharp remark is on the tip of your tongue, and you swallow it. That looks like level-headedness. But perhaps it was only worry about how you'd look afterwards, or a tiredness that no longer wants any confrontation.
Then it wouldn't have been a calm judgement checking an impulse, but one impulse checking another. From the outside the two can't be told apart, and often not straight away from the inside either. In both cases the sentence goes unsaid.
A difference tends to show itself later. What was held back out of worry comes back: on the way home, in a reply you work out word for word in your head. What you actually examined and found unimportant, on the other hand, loses its weight without your having to push it aside on purpose.
The two rarely come apart cleanly. In the evening the remark occurs to you again. It wasn't so wrong after all; only the tone wouldn't have been right. You would have had to find the right one first.
