What Stands in the Way Becomes the Way
Stoic Strength Series, Episode 2 The obstacle is not a detour from the life you were meant to live — it is the material that life is made from. On Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and the wall that becomes the road. Not an ending — a beginning that has not yet introduced itself. There is a particular kind of despair that arrives not from the obstacle itself, but from the sense that the obstacle should not be there at all — that life has made an administrative error, and if we simply protest loudly enough, someone will come and correct it. I have felt this. I suspect everyone has. And I have come to believe it is the single most useless emotion available to a human being, because the obstacle does not care that we think it a mistake. It simply remains, indifferent to our objections, waiting to be either climbed or resented. Marcus Aurelius , ruling an empire that was, by any reasonable measure, falling apart around him — plague, war, betrayal from within his own household — wrote himself a ...
