The whole city is in a fever of celebration, and I find myself thinking about whether to join in or hold apart — and then thinking that the question itself is the wrong one.
The right answer isn't to refuse the holiday. It's to participate without being swept away by it. There's more self-control in that than in conspicuous abstinence: to do what the crowd does, but differently — neither performing restraint nor losing yourself in excess. Keep the holiday. Just keep yourself too.
But here's the practice I actually want to recommend, and it has nothing to do with the festival: set aside some days — a few each month, more than you think — when you eat the simplest possible food, wear the plainest clothes, and strip the day of everything that isn't necessary. Then sit with the question: is this the condition I feared?
This is not asceticism for its own sake. It's training. The soldier digs earthworks in peacetime not because the earthworks are needed now but because the arms need to remember what they're for. When the crisis actually arrives — and it will arrive, in whatever form fortune chooses — the person who has rehearsed poverty will not flinch. The person who has only ever known comfort will.
Epicurus used to do this, and he was supposed to be the philosopher of pleasure. He tested himself on barley and water, not because he enjoyed it, but to discover how far he actually fell short of happiness when the comforts were removed. His report: not very far. The pleasure of needing little is quieter than the pleasure of having much, but it is steadier, and fortune cannot take it.
This is forestalling the spear-thrusts of fortune. Become intimate with poverty so it cannot catch you off guard.
When you find that a simple meal satisfies, and that the satisfaction is real — not forced, not pretended — you'll know something about yourself that no amount of comfortable living can teach you. You'll know where your actual floor is. And knowing that, you can walk anywhere without fear.
One more thing before I close, because this letter needs a final thought and it arrived today from Epicurus:
Ungoverned anger begets madness.
Watch where your anger actually starts. Not in the obvious provocations — those you expect and can prepare for. Watch for it in love, in jest, in the small daily frictions. The flame doesn't care how great it was; it cares what it falls upon. A tiny spark in dry wood is more dangerous than a great fire falling on stone.
Tend the material, not just the flame.
Yours, fasting occasionally and better for it,