Control, and the parts you cannot carry

Half past four in the afternoon, and the light is already off the tops of the oaks and down in the creek.

There is a stripe of it lying along the water the way it does when the trees close in higher up.

The wind is doing nothing in particular. It isn’t a weather to have an opinion about.

Bo is up ahead of me with his nose in the leaf litter at the second bend.

He is working at something he is going to leave behind.

I’m late on the ridge tonight. That is the whole of it.

And I’m going to talk about a habit I have had for four years and have never once put on this walk.

Here is what happened, and it wasn’t dramatic. That is going to be a relief.

On Tuesday evening I stopped at the second bend and didn’t walk on for about eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes standing still on a ridge isn’t a thing anybody does on purpose.

I know it was eleven because the light had not moved off the sycamore at the second bend. It hadn’t moved when I finished either.

So I stood there and ran a conversation again.

A conversation I had already had. With a man who wasn’t there and wasn’t going to be there.

And I won it. Twice, at least. It went the way I wanted both times.

I want to say that winning it didn’t feel good. That is the part I didn’t expect.

It felt like being somewhere warm in the cold. Which is a good feeling, and which is why it took eleven minutes and why I did not notice it going on.

Here is the part I don’t like.

While I was standing there, I was also moving a load. Not the conversation. Something else.

A thing about next Thursday.

Whether the shop keeps doing what we have been doing on Thursdays. Who decided that. Who I’m going to have to be unpleasant to about it.

I moved it while I was winning the conversation, and it felt exactly like putting down a bag I’ve been carrying up a hill.

Then I walked on, and it came back by the second bend.

So this is a man who can sort out a whole evening of his own trouble while standing in one place. And then gets taken out at the bottom of the hill by the same trouble again.

I’d like somebody to explain that to me.

So here’s the question for today.

Why does putting a thing down feel so much like losing it?

That is a real question and I do not have a clean answer for it.

I have asked it before on this walk and I’ve got two answers, and both of them were wrong.

The first answer was that it’s only habit. That you’re used to carrying things, and putting one down feels like dropping a glove.

That one lasted about a year.

The second answer was that it’s pride. That you would rather be the person holding it than the person who let it go.

That one was mostly right and it was no use at all, because pride is a thing I have plenty of either way.

So now I have gone and asked an old man. About two thousand years old, and everything he said was written down by somebody else.

Before I go any further I want to put my hand up. This is a borrowing.

I’m standing well outside that old world and taking one thing out of it. That is the polite way of saying I’m borrowing, and I’ll come back to what it costs me later.

The name is Epictetus.

He was born about the year fifty of our era, in a town called Hierapolis, in what’s Turkey now. He spent his young years as a slave in Rome, and he died about the year a hundred and thirty-five.

He was freed, and he taught for the rest of his life. He walked with a limp. Nobody agrees where the limp came from.

He taught for most of that in a Greek town called Nicopolis, near the coast in the west of the country. Students came to him from a long way off.

He didn’t go there by choice, exactly. Rome got rid of its philosophers once, in the middle of his life.

That is about when he left and went to the coast.

He taught in the open, in the street and in the forecourt of his own house. He wouldn’t take money for it, and he was poor for a good part of his life.

And he told his students not to go around calling themselves philosophers.

Show it in how you eat and how you walk, was the gist. Not in what you call yourself.

I have thought about that for four years. A freed man doing the teaching, in a city full of the sons of the people who used to own men like him.

Now. Here is the bit about him that I want you to hold on to, because it changes what the whole thing is.

He never wrote any of it down. Not one line.

Everything that survives under his name was written down by somebody else.

That somebody was his student, Arrian. A Roman senator later on, and a historian in his own right.

He wrote down what he heard the man say, in the street and in his own front room, mostly. He did it as a listener taking notes, not as a writer picking a subject.

Two things came out of that. A long set of talks that scholars call the Discourses, and a short one people carry around called the Handbook.

The short one is the one I’m using. And I want to be careful about how I use it, so I’ll say what it’s not.

It isn’t a rulebook from a wise man on a mountain. It is a man in a cold front room, talking to whoever came in that morning.

I’m not going to read you his words. I don’t have them, and I don’t want them.

Here are mine, and they’re about as plain as I can make them.

His whole move was a line on the floor that you draw once and keep.

Some of the day is yours to move. Most of it’s not.

That is it. That is the whole idea, and it’s about two thousand years old.

It sounds like nothing. I want to be fair, because that’s how it sounds.

It sounds like a man being calm at you. It sounds like not making a fuss about the weather.

Here is why it is not that. It is not about being calm. Calm is what you look like.

It is about what you decide to do with your hands, which is a completely different question.

And it’s not a way of saying nothing matters. That is a thing people hear in this and get wrong.

He was plenty sharp about what mattered. He cared what people did with the one life they had.

He just put the caring in one place and the trouble in another, and he thought you couldn’t afford to mix them.

But don’t stop there, because a one line idea with no instructions is how people get into trouble.

So he had a habit for the morning, and the habit is the part I actually want.

The habit was this. Before your feet are properly on the floor, you take the day you’re about to have and you walk through it.

You don’t walk through it hoping. You walk through it the way a man walks a creek he knows has a hole in it.

And the day you’re imagining isn’t a good day. It is a day with all the trouble in it.

In his short book he tells his reader to expect to meet people who are going to be tiresome. Grumpy people. People who are going to take something off you. People who are going to say something with an edge on it.

And the instruction isn’t to be nicer to them. The instruction is to line yourself up so that none of it can knock you over.

You don’t go into the day trying to make them different. You already know what they’re going to do. You have said so out loud, in advance, on purpose.

That is the whole rehearsal. Not a prayer. Not a mood. A list of the trouble you are not going to be surprised by.

I’ve been trying to do this for about four years and I want to tell you how it’s going, honestly.

It doesn’t work.

Not even slightly. And I do not mean that it is unhelpful. I mean it does not do what it is supposed to do at all.

The thing it is supposed to do is take the weight off. And the weight does not come off. It moves.

Before I had the habit I’d be ambushed by a thing at two in the afternoon.

Now I get ambushed at six in the morning instead, except that I have already agreed to it.

Here is the specific way it failed, and it is embarrassing, which is the only way this is worth telling you.

The Thursday thing. The one from the second bend.

I told myself about it on Wednesday morning. On purpose. I went through the whole of it. Somebody is going to be disappointed. I’m going to be the one who says it. It will be uncomfortable. None of it’s in my hands.

And I felt great for about six hours. I’ve never felt so ready for anything.

Then Thursday came round and I did the exact thing I had said I’d not do.

I tried to soften the other person up first. That wasn’t on the list. That part was mine. It was small, and it was dishonest, and I did it because I didn’t want the conversation I had promised myself I’d have.

So the rehearsal didn’t make me ready. It made me well prepared. Those aren’t the same, and I didn’t know the difference until I got caught.

Now I’ve got to do the part where I take the idea seriously enough to say what’s wrong with it.

Otherwise it’s just a nice old habit and I could have got the same thing out of anybody.

First thing. A line you draw once and keep is not a line. It is a habit, and habits have a bad side.

Mine is that the line is drawn in the wrong place almost every time.

Something goes on the not-mine side because it is easier. Not because I have thought about it. Because it was easier at six in the morning.

And there’s a second version of that, which is worse. You can draw the line so that nothing is ever yours.

If everything is somebody else’s fault and everything is out of your hands, then you never have to do the hard part of anything.

That isn’t freedom. That is a very tidy hole to sit in.

Second thing, and this one he is actually harder about than I have said so far.

He wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to well off Romans with families and a street in the city.

They were worried about money, and reputation, and what their neighbours thought.

For a person like that, the advice is easy. Your boy isn’t going to be the boy you planned. Your neighbour is going to be exactly who he is. Get on with it.

Now put the same advice to somebody who’s on the wrong end of it. The same words, and now they’re not a hard truth. They are a wall.

I’ve got to say that out loud, because I have watched a person use this idea as a reason not to look.

I have watched somebody in trouble be told that the trouble isn’t theirs to have.

They cannot even be angry about it. And being angry was the only honest thing left.

That is not what he was after. But that is what the idea can be made to do, and he wasn’t around to argue with the people doing it.

And I want to be fair about one more thing before I let go of it.

This is the oldest idea I have ever tried to use, and I didn’t come to it. Everybody who has ever picked up a book about how to live has met it.

If it were only wrong, it would have been forgotten. It has survived two thousand years, so something in it holds up.

What holds up is the bit about the hands. That part is not clever and it is not mystical and it doesn’t need me to be anybody.

The bit about who it’s for, that’s the part that needs watching.

Third thing, and this is the one I keep.

Some of what you cannot move is still yours to work on.

That sounds like a contradiction and it is not. Your own reaction to the thing isn’t the thing. It is yours, and it is the only part you get to keep.

I have found that out the slow way, on a Thursday, being unpleasant to somebody I didn’t need to be unpleasant to.

Now. Back to the ridge, because it is nearly dark and I haven’t asked you to do anything yet.

The light has gone off the creek. It is in the sycamores and it’s going fast.

Here is what I’d actually do with this, now that I have spent four years failing at it.

I would keep the line. I would stop keeping the list.

The line is worth keeping because it stops me from arguing with a person who’s not in the room.

The list isn’t, because the list turns the day into something I’ve got to survive.

And the difference between those two is the whole thing I’ve got.

I didn’t know that for four years. It took about forty seconds to understand once somebody said it.

Here is how that went, because it is the most ordinary thing that has ever happened to me.

I was in the shop and somebody asked me a question about a thing I had already decided about.

The voice in my head said the answer I wanted. I said it out loud. The person was pleased. I wasn’t.

Nothing had gone wrong. That is the part I keep coming back to.

No tray was broken. Nobody was in the wrong. The rain held off.

And I still went out into the car park afterwards and did the thing I do.

So whatever this is, it’s not a response to trouble. It is a thing I do when nothing is wrong, and that is a good deal harder to fix than trouble.

Here is a thing that’s not a worry at all. I have carried it up this hill for years.

Whether this walk is any good. Whether anybody is listening. Whether the thing I said at the top is going to hold up at the bottom.

Two of those three are not mine. I do not get a vote on how good a thing is. I never have.

The third one is mine, and it is a small thing, and I have been pretending it is the size of the other two.

That is the shape of my whole mistake. It is not a grand one. I would rather tell you about this than a grand one.

Here is the other one, from the same walk, and it’s dumber.

The leaf litter under the second bend is going to be there tomorrow whether I notice it or not.

I have noticed it every morning for four years. Nobody has ever asked me to. It is the most reliable thing on this hill.

So I don’t need to say that one out loud. Saying it out loud would be a way of making me look like I had been paying attention.

That is a thing I do. It is worth about half an hour of talking. It goes in the pile with the leaf litter.

Both piles are honest. That is the part nobody tells you. The piles aren’t a moral chart.

Bo has now come back up the trail without the thing he was working at. I didn’t see him pick it up and I didn’t see him leave it.

He has also stopped complaining about the wind, which is the closest he has come to agreeing with me about anything.

Now the honest answer to my question. The one I said I’d give you before the end.

I don’t know why it feels like loss.

What I can tell you is what it is not. It is not the loss of the thing. The Thursday is still there. It was never in my hands and it hasn’t left them.

It is the loss of the holding. And I think I got that far because of the standing still.

Because standing on a ridge being pleased with how a conversation went is the cheapest thing there is. It costs nothing and nobody is in it.

So putting it down doesn’t feel like giving anything up.

It feels like stopping the only part of the evening that was actually happening.

I’d not have worked that out on my own. I’ve got four years of getting it wrong to thank for it.

And I want to be careful here, because I don’t think holding is bad.

Holding is what I’ve got instead of being in the thing. The Thursday conversation was bad because I did it badly.

Standing on a ridge and winning it wasn’t the opposite of being in it. There was nobody to be in it with.

That is the whole of the honest answer. It took four years and it’s about a conversation that never happened.

So here is the thing to try, and it’s one walk, and it’s the two piles.

Take one walk. Take the worries you turn up with, the ones that were waiting at the door before you got in.

Do not pick a big one. Pick one you can say in a sentence.

And say the sentence out loud as you say it to yourself. Not the clean version.

The clean version is the one where you’re being reasonable about it.

The plain version is shorter and it’s uglier and it’s the one that’s actually true.

Now walk it and put each one in one of two piles, out loud, one at a time.

The first pile is the thing you can move. The second pile is the thing you can’t move.

Say which pile it is. Out loud, so somebody could hear you. The somebody is allowed to be a dog.

When one goes in the first pile, say the one small thing you are going to do about it.

One thing. Not the whole answer. The next move, the one you could do before dark.

That is the half that matters, and it is the half that makes the exercise an exercise and not a mood.

Here is my test for it, and it’s the only one I have.

If you couldn’t say the small thing out loud, it’s not in the first pile. Move it over.

And here’s the part that does the work, so don’t skip past it.

When you put one in the second pile, don’t say anything else about it.

No explanation of why it’s out of your hands. No complaint about the person who put it there.

Just the pile, and then the next one.

That is the whole assignment. One walk, one sentence each, two piles.

Then one more thing, and you can leave it out.

If you finish the walk with a thing from the second pile still in your hands, that’s the interesting one. Not a failure of the exercise.

Do not fix it in the same hour. Wait until morning and see whether it’s still there.

No paper, no app, nothing to download. It fits on a walk to the mailbox.

If you do want a scrap, two lines is the whole form. One line for each pile, and no third column.

And if you would rather do the longer version, do the same two piles three days running and keep the three lists side by side.

That is where it gets good. A thing you put in the first pile on Sunday and again on Tuesday is a different thing from one you only named once.

And nobody has to know you did it. There is nothing to report and nobody to send it to.

The proof that it happened is that you said two sentences out loud that you had only been having in your head. That is the whole receipt.

One thing I’ll not do is ask you what came up. I’m not collecting them.

Skip it if you want. You still get twenty-five minutes of a man failing at a two thousand year old habit in the dark.

I have still not got the two piles right. I have got them closer.