I want to talk about the way you suffer in advance. I do it too — so hear this as something I'm working out for both of us.
There is the actual difficulty, and then there is everything you add to it before it arrives. The waiting, the rehearsing, the building of elaborate catastrophes in quiet moments. By the time some things finally happen, you've already lived through them three or four times. You arrive at the real event exhausted from all the imaginary ones.
No one is tormented by the future. They are tormented by their thoughts about it, which they have mistaken for the future.
Fortune throws things down like prizes scattered into a crowd — and watch what happens. People shove, grab, tear. Half of them lose what they've caught while reaching for something else. The smart move, Seneca says, is to walk out of the theatre before the scramble starts. Not because the things being thrown aren't real. But because the cost of chasing them — the anxiety, the vigilance, the perpetual looking over your shoulder — is almost never worth what you catch.
This doesn't mean detachment from people. That's where I want to push back on a surface reading of Stoicism, because it can sound cold. What it means is that the love you have for the people in your life — the real substance of it, the virtue it's made of — that can't be taken from you. The fountain remains even when the water is gone. The shape of who you became through loving them is yours. Loss is real and grief is real, but they are not the destruction of you.
The circle can be drawn large or small. Its shape is the same either way.
I think of you sometimes in the middle of ordinary days, carrying things you don't need to carry yet. Put them down. The pain that's actually coming will ask enough of you when it arrives. Don't meet it halfway, years early, alone in the dark.
With love — and I mean now, this moment, this —