05/01/2019
Part of my daily stoic read.
Epictetus says that “if your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.” It’s simple and it’s true. You are what your choices make you, nothing more and nothing less.
Today will present you with plenty of opportunities to choose—between beauty or ugliness; kindness or selfishness; mercy or vengeance; serenity or anger.
There will be little choices—what you eat, how you talk to people, whether you pick up the television remote or a book, what you think about—and there will be bigger choices too: whether you stand up for what’s right, whether you reach down to help someone who needs it, what kind of work you do, what standards you hold yourself to.
It’s often easier to make the ugly, selfish, vengeful angry choice. To choose to give into your temper or to keep doing things the way you’ve always done them. Beautiful choices—like physical fitness or perfect skin—are rarely as effortless as they seem. No, there is a regimen behind them. It takes exercise, it takes discipline, it takes sacrifice.
But when you see the results? Well, it can take your breath away.
It also depends on how you look at things. Learn to celebrate the small victories. For instants if you continuously feel like you’re taking two steps forward and one step back. Look at it like a dance. Like you’re doing the cha-cha. Not like each day you’re failing just a little bit more. Dance people!
