December 15
The good man colours events with his own colour and turns everything that happens to his own advantage.
Letters to Lucilius, Letter 98 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The good man colours events with his own colour and turns everything that happens to his own advantage.
After a hard time, someone eventually asks you what you learned from it. The question is usually kindly meant. Still, you notice how it pushes your answer into a particular shape: in the end, something should have come of it that justifies the price.
Perhaps you have an answer like that ready. It sounds reasonable, and it isn't entirely wrong. It just shifts something. What happened to you becomes the backstory to an insight, as if it had been working towards it from the start. A loss is given, after the fact, a purpose it never had.
Making something of an event is still not the same as glossing over it. The difference rarely shows in what you say about it. More in small things that have changed without your having decided on them: whom you write back to these days, or how long you stay with someone else's bad news before you say something comforting.
Asked the question, you probably wouldn't mention any of this. It wouldn't even occur to you.
