Seneca was exiled on trumped up charges. The same thing happened to Rutilius Rufus. The same thing happened to Musonius Rufus…three separate times. These men—indeed all the Stoics—came to know what it meant to be hurt, to be wronged, to have something taken from them. What about Epictetus? He was thrown into slavery. What about Marcus Aurelius, who buried half his children? No one deserves something like that.
How do you get over it? How do you move on? You don't. Not really.
In Lonesome Dove, Gus McRae consoles a man who just had his friend and his stepson brutally murdered. "Son, this is a sad thing," McRae says. "Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good…Don't be trying to give back pain for pain. You can't get even in business like this." The Plains were a dark and lawless place, he was saying, the men who did this are evil in a way that you cannot possibly punish. This isn't what we want to hear of course: We want permission to rage and to burn. We want to make the people responsible feel our pain. We want the world to feel our pain.
Yet the Stoics texts are replete with timeless warnings against this. Marcus Aurelius quotes a lost line from a play by Euripides: "Why should we be angry at the world? As if the world would notice." Seneca in his essays on anger and in letters, compares revenge to returning a bite to a dog or a kick to a mule. They were accepting, in a way, the impotence of us fragile humans. Stuff happens to us. People do cruel things to each other. You can't get even in a world like that. You'll never beat them at that game—there are too many of them and they are worse than you can imagine.
But you know what you can do? How you can move on? How you can get revenge? The only way, Marcus Aurelius said, was to not be like that. To not let it ruin you, to not let it consume your life, to not let its inhumanity steal your humanity.
P.S. Today is Earth Day, a day for global cooperation and environmental awareness. It's an idea the Stoics first captured thousands of years ago through something called Sympatheia—the radical notion that we are all interconnected and interdependent upon one another. "We are made for each other," Marcus says. That's why we created the Sympatheia medallion to carry around and remember that none of us are ever alone. Instead, we are part of one larger organism and owe each other a duty above and beyond our selfish concerns, a concept best expressed through the famous 1972 "Blue Marble" photograph of Earth on the front of the coin, which instantly changed man's perspective on himself. So on this Earth Day, as a reminder we're in this together on all the other days, head over to the Daily Stoic Store and get the Sympatheia medallion TODAY!
