The body is not something to despise or ignore. It's the medium through which everything else happens, and reasonable care of it is reasonable. What I'm warning against is the opposite: making the body your master, organizing your entire life around its safety and comfort, judging everything by what threatens it or pleases it. He who makes his body his master will have many masters — because the body is vulnerable to everything, and a life spent defending it is a life spent in fear.
There are three things we actually fear, when we're honest about it: poverty, sickness, and the violence of those more powerful than us. The first two arrive quietly, without theater. The third comes with an entourage — weapons, chains, crowds, all the apparatus of power making itself visible. It's the third that terrorizes most, not because it's most likely to arrive, but because it announces itself in advance and makes sure you see it coming.
The practical answer is to give it as little reason to notice you as possible.
Don't make enemies among the powerful. Navigate around storms the way a careful pilot navigates around Charybdis — not dramatically, not with visible contempt, but with a quiet adjustment of course that doesn't announce itself as avoidance. What we openly avoid, we openly condemn, and condemnation invites response.
Keep your possessions modest. The highwayman doesn't trouble the traveler who carries nothing worth taking. Poverty, genuine or chosen, is a kind of armor — not because suffering is good, but because there's less to lose and therefore less to threaten. Those who have nothing to plunder travel safely even on dangerous roads.
Avoid, above all, provoking either jealousy or contempt — which is harder than it sounds, because the precautions against one can trigger the other. The middle path is obscurity. Philosophy provides a version of this: it is universally respected and privately pursued, it attracts no enemies, it claims no territory that the ambitious covet. Even the powerful tend to leave philosophers alone, as long as the philosophers don't start making speeches.
None of this guarantees safety. Nothing does. Ships perish in harbor; the careful sailor sometimes drowns alongside the reckless one. But the odds are different, and the wise person plays the odds without being paralyzed by uncertainty. The beginning is in our own power — we choose how to act. What follows is fortune's business. We don't let fortune pass sentence on us.
He who needs riches least, enjoys riches most.
This is the version of security that actually holds. Not the accumulation of enough that you feel safe — that threshold keeps moving and is never reached. But the genuine reduction of need, so that what you have is genuinely enough, and fortune has less leverage over you than she has over most. The person who craves wealth is anxious about it before they have it and after. The person who has learned to need little is free in a way that the wealthy person, adding to their accounts and wearing out the pavement, is not.
Stop keeping such careful inventory. Start enjoying what you have.
Yours, traveling light,