I've been trying to do a particular task for my work. I initially thought it would take a week, but obstacles I've never dealt with before kept getting in my way, and I've had to slog through it slowly, and now my week-long task has turned into a two-month long task. This last Friday, I was hoping I was almost done. But no, someone discovered several significant problems remaining before my task was finished. By the time I left on Friday, I was feeling very tense and frustrated. I had thoughts of giving up the task as hopeless.
As I calmed down on the subway, though, I realized things weren't so bad. Yes, I was continually struggling with new and strange issues, but that meant I was learning things. And when I thought about it, what I was learning was kind of interesting. From this other angle, instead of being confronted with a horrible successions of setbacks and problems, I was learning more and more about a complicated system. Yes, I was failing to accomplish my task, but I was gaining expertise, and this expertise is valuable.
To be honest, this didn't completely alleviate my frustration. My emotions still exert too much influence. But in this case I was able to calm them down quite a bit through re-interpreting my. Perhaps this is the first concrete evidence of Stoic philosophy having a positive impact on my life.
I'll let the words of Epictetus end this post.
Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things: for example, death is nothing terrible, for if it were, it would have seemed so to Socrates; for the opinion about death, that is terrible, is the terrible thing. When then we are impeded or disturbed or grieved, let us never blame others, but ourselves, that is, our opinions. It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.
