Discipline Is Destiny

Gehrig wore his fame lightly, an observer once noted, but took the obligations of it seriously.

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King George IV was a notorious glutton. His breakfast consisted of two pigeons, three steaks, a near full bottle of wine, and a glass of brandy. In time, he grew so fat he could no longer sleep lying down or the weight of his own chest might asphyxiate him. He had trouble signing documents—he eventually had his attendants make a stamp for his signature to save him even this basic exertion. Still, he managed to father several illegitimate children while generally neglecting the business of being a king.

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That his body could and would endure unlimited abuse without consequence. Indeed, his last words, when years of bad habits and lethargy finally caught up with him at 3:30 am in the summer of 1830, were: “Good God, what is this?” Then he realized what it was. “My boy,” he said as he grasped the hand of a page, “this is death.” It was almost as if he was surprised to find out that he was mortal … and that treating his body like a garbage can for four decades had consequences.

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The pleasure of excess is always fleeting. Which is why self-discipline is not a rejection of pleasure but a way to embrace it. Treating our body well, moderating our desires, working hard, exercising, hustling—this is not a punishment. This is simply the work for which pleasure is the reward.

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“Don’t scold me,” he once told his father, “or I shall have the asthma.” And on many nights he did. Crippling, terrifying attacks that nearly killed him. But at his father’s patient encouragement,

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Swim. Lift weights. Train in jujitsu. Take long walks. You can choose the means, but the method is a must: You must be active. Get your daily win. Treat the body rigorously, as Seneca tells us, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind. Because as you’re building muscle, you’re also building willpower. More important, you’re building this willpower and strength while most people are not.

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“Show me a man who isn’t a slave,” Seneca demanded, pointing out that even slave owners were chained to the responsibilities of the institution of slavery. “One is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear.” The first step, he said, was to pull yourself out of the ignorance of your dependency, whatever it happens to be. Then you need to get clean—get clean from your mistress, from your addiction to work, from your lust for power, whatever. In the modern era, we might be hooked on cigarettes or soda, likes on social media, or watching cable news. It doesn’t matter whether it’s socially acceptable or not, what matters is whether it’s good for you. Eisenhower’s habit was killing him, as so many of ours are too—slowly, imperceptibly.

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all its determinants and risks known, would you still take a drink? Knowing how much time you spend on it now, would you still download that app if it launched today? If you knew the promotion and the success would leave you divorced and unhappy despite your riches, would you still have set out for it all those years ago? But just because you started, doesn’t mean you have to continue. The fact that you didn’t know then doesn’t change the fact that you’re choosing it now.

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Cato the Elder never wore a garment that cost more than a few dollars. He drank the same wine as his slaves, with whom he regularly worked alongside in the fields. He bought his food in the public markets. He rejected the expensive trappings of high society. “Nothing is cheap,” he said, “if it is superfluous.”

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At the height of the great conqueror’s powers, some men were sent to bribe Curius but found him in his kitchen boiling turnips. In an instant, they knew their mission was futile. A man satisfied with so little could never be tempted.

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A Spartan king was once asked what the Spartans got from their “spartan” habits. “Freedom is what we reap from this way of life,” he told him.

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The boxer Rubin Carter survived some nineteen years of wrongful imprisonment. How? It wasn’t his wealth that got him through but the opposite. He stripped himself, deliberately, of the most basic amenities in prison: no pillows, no radio, no rugs, no TV, no porn. Why? So that nothing could be taken from him.

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By being a little hard on ourselves, it makes it harder for others to be hard on us. By being strict with ourselves, we take away others’ power over us.

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person who lives below their means has far more latitude than a person who can’t. That’s why Michelangelo, the artist, didn’t live as austerely as Cato but he avoided the gifts dangled by his wealthy patrons. He didn’t want to owe anyone. Real wealth, he understood, was autonomy.

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Remember: No one is having less fun than an overextended, overcommitted person with debtors at their door … or a high-paying job they can’t afford to lose. No one is less free than the person trapped on the treadmill moving faster and faster and faster but going nowhere. I would die without my [insert luxury item], we’ll say in jest. How can anybody live like this? we’ll ask not so rhetorically.

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The answer? They’re stronger than you. “The more a man is,” the editor Maxwell Perkins had inscribed on his mantel, “the less he wants.” When you strip away the unnecessary and the excessive, what’s left is you. What’s left is what’s important.

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How do you know if something is superfluous? Well, one indication can be how hard other people are pushing it on you. The insecure constantly pressure us to be like them. Another is how much your interest is motivated by keeping up or a fear of missing out. Ask yourself: Haven’t I and humanity survived quite a long time without this? How did it go last time I got the thing I craved—how long did the feeling last (compared to the buyer’s remorse)? And how will you know that this thing won’t actually make your life easier? Because the last thing didn’t either! Go check your junk drawer or the back of your closet for proof.

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Robert Moses was not a kind man, but he was effective. He got more done in his decades in power than few believed possible, building 2,567,256 acres of parkland, 658 playgrounds, 416 miles of parkways, 13 bridges, housing, tunnels, stadiums, civic centers, exhibition halls—some $27 billion in total of constructed public works across New York. He didn’t just do his job well, he did multiple jobs well, simultaneously serving in twelve positions, including as New York City Parks Commissioner, president of the State Power Commission, and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority over a forty-four-year career.

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His accomplishments that shaped and defined New York City from 1924 to 1968 deserve to be measured, his biographer said, not against his predecessors and successors, or even against other cities, but against entire civilizations. How did he do it? Raw Machiavellian power, of course. An insane work ethic. A callous insensitivity to collateral damage, an indifference to the consequences of his actions. A driving ambition and relentless desire to put his mark on the roads and parks and skyline of New York. But beyond that, whether you respect him or despise him, you ought to know that one secret to his success was rather simple: having a clean desk.

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wasn’t technically a desk. Robert Moses preferred to work off a large table, because it made him more effective and encouraged better workflow. Moses believed in processing: Something came in and he dealt with it. Mail, memos, reports—he didn’t let any of it sit, let alone pile up. “Since a table has no drawers,” Caro wrote of Moses’s system, “there was no place to hide papers; there was no escape from a nagging problem or a difficult-to-answer letter except to get rid of it in one way or another.” By keeping his desk and office organized, Moses got stuff done. But you?

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Thus the axiom from author Gretchen Rubin: Outer order, inner calm. If we want to think well and work well, it doesn’t start with the mind. It starts with walking around and cleaning up. “I tell my students,” Toni Morrison explained, “one of the most important things they need to know is when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?”

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Because a person comfortable with a messy workspace will become comfortable with sloppy work. A person who doesn’t eliminate noise will miss the messages from the muses. A person who puts up with needless friction will eventually be worn down.

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Of course, this is less about spit and polish than it is about orderliness or kosmiotes, as the Stoics called it. Chefs speak of mise en place—prepping and organizing everything you need before setting down and getting down to work. Nothing spilling out onto anything else. Nothing random. Nothing getting in the way, nothing slowing anything or anyone down.

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Imagine what you could get done if you had the discipline to proactively put everything in order first. If you committed to orderliness and enforced it on yourself. Don’t think of that as another obligation, another thing to worry about. Because in practice, it will free you.

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As the novelist Gustave Flaubert commands: Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

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Clean up your desk. Make your bed. Get your things in order. Now get after it.

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Not quite, but he did readily concede that most of the credit belonged to something other than his brain. “The ‘genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night,” Edison said. “If anything happens he’s there to catch it; if he wasn’t, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his.”

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What he’s talking about is showing up. The incredible, underrated power of clocking in every day, putting your ass in the seat, and the luck this seems to inevitably produce. Edison lived in his laboratory and never missed a day—like Gehrig, even when he was sick, when he was tired, or when visited by tragedy or disaster.

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The modern conveniences we can trace to his lab then, owe far more to his body than his brain, to the compounding power of consistency rather than sheer brilliance. It wasn’t about inspiration. It was about getting to work.

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“The devil is in the details,” the great admiral Hyman Rickover used to say, “but so is salvation.” And as the reckless and irresponsible Zelda Fitzgerald said with only some self-awareness, the opposite is also true. “It is the loose-ends,” she lamented, “with which men hang themselves.”

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anything made better by inattention? the philosopher Epictetus would ask. Of course not! Whether you’re a carpenter or an athlete, an investor or an infantry officer, greatness is in the details. Details require self-discipline. Even if nobody else notices … or cares.

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Dating back perhaps to time immemorial is the poem and proverb about a horse. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,” it begins. And then because of the shoe, the horse was lost and because of the horse, the rider and because of the rider, the message and because of the message the battle and because of the battle, the kingdom. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.

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A dazzling rise that, unlike most of his predecessors and successors, actually stuck. Because it was in accordance with his favorite saying, festina lente. That is, to make haste slowly. As we learn from the historian Suetonius, “He thought nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness,” Suetonius wrote. “And, accordingly, favorite sayings of his were: ‘More haste, less speed’; ‘Better a safe commander than a bold’; and ‘That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.’

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“Slowly,” the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez would say, “you do everything correctly.”

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“Doing things badly,” Jiménez would say to critics or editors or even impatient readers, “does not give you the right to demand haste from the person who does them well.”

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It is said that the master swordsman Nakayama Hakudo would practice drawing his sword some two thousand times a day. At the Hayashizaki temple, in one marathon of endurance training, he was recorded drawing his sword ten thousand times in a single twenty-four-hour period.

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Because, as Octavian’s teacher Arius Didymus said, “Practice over a long time turns into second nature.” We don’t rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of our training.

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“A thousand days of training to develop,” Musashi would write, “ten thousand days of training to polish.” For a samurai, there was no such thing as pretty good. If a pretty good swordsman met a better fighter … he would die. It’s like the basketball Hall of Famer Bill Bradley’s observation: When you are not practicing, refining, working—somewhere, someone else is … and when you meet them, they will beat you. Or kill you.

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In ancient Greece, there was not only a word to describe this kind of ceaseless work ethic—philoponia—there were even awards for it. It’s this love of toil, of the process that defined someone like Lou Gehrig. It was the reporter Dan Daniel, who asked Gehrig in 1933, whether he had any idea how many games he’d played in a row. Gehrig guessed several hundred. In fact, it was already more than double that. The same is likely true for Oates: If asked how many books she’d written, she’d probably undercount. That isn’t how she thinks. She thinks about the work, el trabajo gustoso, as one writer put it—the pleasurable work—not what has come out the other side.

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“I have always lived a very conventional life of moderation,” she explained, “absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic, no need, even, to organize my time. We each have a twenty-four-hour day, which is more than enough time to do what we must do.”

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awards and fame and weeks on the bestseller list. Others want a guarantee: If I put in my ten thousand hours, then I’ll get the job? Then I’ll be able to go pro? Then I’ll be rich? No, that’s not how this goes. Always and forever, the reward is the work. It is a joy itself. It is torture and also heaven—sweaty, wonderful salvation. And that’s how you manage to do prodigious amounts of it—not grudgingly, but lovingly.[*]

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“I’m not conscious of working, especially hard, or of ‘working’ at all,” Oates said. “Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don’t think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.” We don’t get anywhere in this life without work. But we can get somewhere magical when we do the kind of work that doesn’t even feel like work. When we follow the excitement that gets us into the harness, that gets us out in the fields, when we follow the urge to get moving and get at it. Decide who you want to be, the Stoics command us, and then do that work.

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The simple name for it: load management. “We’ve done this before in hopes of making a wiser decision, rather than a popular decision,” he told a reporter of what would become a ubiquitous coaching practice. “It’s pretty logical.” Logical, yes. Burnout and injuries are way more expensive than time off. Was it popular? No. And definitely not easy.

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Although they come from very different places, the desire to skip a workout and the impulse to work out too much end up in the same place. It’s a short-term bargain with long-term consequences, just as the cost of the pleasure of the candy bar or the drug is paid for down the line … with interest.

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You think you’re getting ahead by taking on a bit more, by pushing a little further. You think it’s impressive to push through the little warning signs of pain. No, no, you’re missing the point. John Steinbeck referred to this as the “indiscipline of overwork,” reminding himself that it was “the falsest of economies.”

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Soon enough, he ended up in the hospital, where he took his own life by jumping out a hallway window. His last words remain unknown to us, but we can see what he was reading, as he left a page from Sophocles marked up, perhaps as a tragic warning to his fellow work-addicts and all of us who have trouble turning it off. Worn by the waste of time— Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save In the dark prospect of the yawning grave… .

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We want to keep winning. But nothing left unchecked lasts for long. Nobody without the ability to self-govern is qualified to govern—that includes not just prodding yourself forward, but also resting yourself, finding balance, listening to your body when it tells you, “I’m about to break!” Absolute activity, of whatever kind, Goethe said, ultimately leads to bankruptcy. Even the great Lou Gehrig knew this. Sure, he had the longest streak in baseball, but on many occasions, if he could feel his performance suffering midgame, he took himself out and called for a pinch hitter. His coaches knew this too—famously “raining out” a game on a cloudless day so that Lou might have a day to recover. And of course, there was the off-season, too, a feature of athletic life that those of us in other professions should consider

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A weak mind must be constantly entertained and stimulated. A strong mind can occupy itself and, more important, be still and vigilant in moments that demand it.

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dreaded word No. “The number of people who stand ready to consume one’s time to no purpose,” he said, “is almost countless.” Some thought him aloof. Some thought him selfish. They said things behind his back. He was too busy to notice. He knew that the main thing in life was to keep the main thing the main thing. Especially when your main thing is uplifting an entire race of people.

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But what is the main thing for the rest of us? That is the main question.

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creative prison. It’s the tragic fate of greats across many different fields. Their success is built on their incredibly high standards—often higher than anyone, including the audience or the market, could demand—but this virtue is also a terrible vice, not just preventing them from enjoying what they have achieved, but making it increasingly impossible to ship the next thing. Because it’s never good enough. Because there’s always more they can do. Because it doesn’t measure up to what they did last time. Da Vinci was like this, becoming almost serially incapable of finishing his paintings. Steve Jobs got stuck releasing the Macintosh before he was fired from Apple. A biographer of the novelist Ralph Ellison speaks of a perfectionism that was so “clogging” the man’s arteries that, in one case, Ellison produced forty drafts of a short statement about one of his own books—a book he had lived and breathed for decades and should have been able to hammer out in forty minutes. The tragic result was that Ellison never published a follow-up to his masterpiece, Invisible Man, despite writing some nineteen inches of futile manuscript pages over the years.

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The one thing all fools have in common, Seneca wrote, is that they’re always getting ready to live. They tell themselves they just need to get some things in place first, that they’re just not feeling it yet, that they’ll get to it after … … what, exactly? Exactly nothing. They never get to it. We never do.

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disciplined than that. “I ceaselessly chant the refrain,” Montaigne said, “anything you can do another day can be done now.” “He who postpones the hour of living right,” Horace wrote, “is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”

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To paraphrase the Stoics: You could be good now. Instead you chose tomorrow. To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you’ll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline now).

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human meaning despite the horrors he endured in the Holocaust. And yet, there is a note he sent to some friends in 1945, just after the war ended, that read: I am unspeakably tired, unspeakably sad, unspeakably lonely … In the camp, you really believed you had reached the low point of life—and then, when you came back, you were forced to see that things had not lasted, everything that had sustained you had been destroyed, that at the time when you have become human again, you could sink into an even more bottomless suffering.

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John F. Kennedy may have been born handsome and rich, but he was not dealt a good hand by the gods. He had a distant, imperious father and was born into a family with a history of addiction. His body was a source of continual trouble. From ulcers to Addison’s disease to a degenerative back problem—exacerbated first by football, then by war injuries—Kennedy was in almost constant pain. And his traumatic childhood and difficult job only added stress and tension on top.

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Remember always: As wrong as they are, as annoying as it is, it takes two for a real conflict to happen. As the Stoics said, when we are offended, when we fight, we are complicit. We have chosen to engage. We have traded self-control for self-indulgence. We’ve allowed our cooler head to turn hot—even though we know hot heads rarely make good decisions. Life … people … they’re going to give you the opportunity. You can decline to accept it.

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Of course, in the calm and mild light of hindsight, no one would trade an NBA championship for a few seconds of celebration or taunting, but that’s the thing about a fit of passion. It blinds us. It carries us away. It overrides our judgment. It makes it impossible to be patient. To bite our tongue. To resist temptation. To ignore a slight. Oh, what this costs us. Oh, what we come to regret. Sometimes it’s a moment of arrogance or excitement. Or anger. Or anxiety. Or avarice. Or envy. Or lust … Think of the powerful men (and women) whose careers were derailed by a sex scandal. They had power, they had influence, the future was bright. What would possess them to risk it all for some fleeting pleasure? Why would someone as brave and decent as Martin Luther King Jr. cheat on his wife in those squalid hotel rooms? The philosopher Democritus wasn’t wrong when he described sex as a “mild madness.” It makes us crazy. It makes us do shameful things.

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As Archimedes once explained at a Spartan dinner, “An expert on speaking also knows when not to do so.” The Spartans kept their tongues in check, even when it meant that some people might think less of them. In a big argument, one Spartan listened but said nothing. Are you stupid? someone asked. “Well, certainly a stupid person wouldn’t be able to keep quiet,” he replied. And of one famous Spartan it was said that it was impossible to “find a man who knew more but spoke less.”

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Angela Merkel famously uses almost no adjectives in her speeches, but when she speaks, you listen, because you know that every word is there for a reason. Cato chose to speak only when he was certain that his words weren’t better left unsaid. Better to be thought foolish or simple than to make a fool of yourself—to prove that you don’t actually have anything to say. Regret what you didn’t say, not the other way around. To be imprecise with language, to fall prey to what they now call “semantic creep”—exaggerating and misusing important words until they have no meaning—this is the mark of not just a sloppy thinker but a bad temperament. When you talk, it should matter. When you say something, it should mean something. Remember: Free speech is a right, not an obligation. Two ears, one mouth, Zeno would remind his students. Respect that ratio properly. Let them wish you talked more. Let them wonder what you’re thinking. Let the words you speak carry extra weight precisely because they are rare. You can answer the question with, “I don’t know.” You can ignore the insult. You can decline the invitation. You can decide not to explain your reasons. You can allow for a pause. You can put it down in your journal instead. You can listen. You can sit with the silence. You can let your actions do the talking. You can listen more than you talk. You can speak only when you’re certain it’s not better left unsaid. Of course, you can. But will you?

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Damning illustrations of the heights of intemperance. And if that weren’t enough, Napoleon then moves in for the coup de grâce, with a pronouncement whose meaning is unmistakable: Ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes, ambition … is, like all inordinate passions, a violent and unthinking fever that ceases only when life ceases—like a conflagration which, fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed.

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Except he died almost immediately after, and his empire collapsed with him. The poet Juvenal remarked that the whole world had not been big enough to contain Alexander … but in the end, a coffin was sufficient.

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Here’s the thing: This never happens. “Fuck-you money” is a chimera. You never get it. Nobody does. Poor people have poor-people problems and rich people have rich-people problems because people always have problems. You’re always going to be subject to the necessity of self-discipline. Or at least, you’ll never be immune from the consequence of ignoring it.

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No amount of money is ever going to truly free you. But being less dependent, caring less about money? That will free you right now.

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The Japanese word for this is kaizen. Continual improvement. Always finding something to work on, to make a little progress on. Never being satisfied, always looking to grow. Revolution? Transformation? That’s what amateurs chase. The pros are after evolution. If the first step is just showing up, committing to doing something each day, then the next step is finding something to focus on getting better at each day. And in this, where cumulative improvement meets compounding returns we can harness one of the most powerful forces on Earth.

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spend together? Because delegation doesn’t just provide time but also space—freedom. It allows us to brief, to think, to connect, to appreciate. King was later asked by an interviewer what he would do with an uninterrupted week of rest. After scoffing at the pure impossibility of such a thing, given the injustices of the world and the demands of the Civil Rights Movement at the time, King explained what he would do: If I had the luxury of an entire week, I would spend it meditating and reading, refreshing myself spiritually and intellectually… . Amidst the struggle, amidst the frustrations, amidst the endless work, I often reflect that I am forever giving—never pausing to take in. I feel urgently the need for even an hour of time to get away, to withdraw, to refuel. I need more time to think through what is being done, to take time out from the mechanics of the movement, to reflect on the meaning of the movement.

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In a world of social media, instant gratification, and the celebration of shamelessness, we don’t much respect people who establish and maintain boundaries. You know, minding your own business. Setting the rules of engagement. Keeping your private life private. Not letting people drag you down into the muck. Not getting entangled in other people’s dysfunctions (or entangling them in yours). Being strong enough to communicate what you like and dislike. Respecting other people’s space and preferences.

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We live in a time of vulgarity and silliness and immaturity and selfishness. A time of freedom that we have decided is actually license for stupidity, unseriousness, and excess. Look at our heroes: Reality TV stars. Influencers. Professional wrestlers. YouTubers. Demagogues.

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Never once did he put himself first. Never once did he prefer his own family’s interests. Instead of complaining or scheming, he quietly got to work on what must have seemed, at least at first, to be a completely unfair, totally thankless job. Not once in his reign, the ancient historians would remark, was Antoninus responsible for the shedding of a single drop of blood, foreign or domestic. This gentleness and devotion to his country, to their cause, to those he loved would earn him a cognomen that, while not as glorious as Alexander the Great or as awesome as William the Conqueror, is all the more magnificent: Antoninus Pius. Temperance, when pursued with this level of dedication, done amid the kind of temptation and stress that Antoninus Pius faced, as the head of an empire comprised of some seventy or eighty million people and some 3.5 million square miles, was a holy thing. Everything that Queen Elizabeth was in ceremony, the Roman emperor was in fact. The emperor had the power to pass laws and enforce them, sitting in review of legal cases. He had the power to wage war and sat at the head of the world’s most ruthless war machine. He had the power to add or remove days from the week, having complete control over the Roman calendar. He had the power to write and, being pontifex maximus, the chief of religious affairs, rewrite the dogma of Roman religion. We know what most emperors did with this power. Pages, volumes, libraries, have been filled with their misdeeds and excesses. So why, then, as the exception to the Roman rule, is Antoninus not so well-known? Such is the irony of temperance. It makes us greater and much less likely to crave recognition for that greatness. Not only was Antoninus notoriously indifferent to superficial honors, he actively avoided them. In a gesture of love toward the end of his reign, the Senate offered to rename the months of September and October after Antoninus and his wife, which he promptly declined. July and August remain named after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar some two thousand years later. Antoninus, for his humility, received no such eternal fame. If anything, Antoninus became a victim of his success. According to the nineteenth-century historian Ernest Renan, “Antoninus would have had the reputation of being the best of sovereigns if he had not designated for his successor a man equal to himself in goodness and in modesty—one who joined to these shining qualities talent, and a charm which make an image to live in the recollection of mankind.” By not assassinating his rival, by instead committing fully to shaping his replacement, Marcus Aurelius, into a great man—a man whose fame eventually outshone the adopted father who had cultivated it—Antoninus condemned himself to the footnotes of history.

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Perhaps it was a rule articulated by Cato’s great-grandfather that helped Cato love and support his brother despite their different approaches to life. “I am prepared to forgive everybody’s mistakes,” Cato the Elder said, “except my own.” Ben Franklin, many generations later, would put forth an even better rule: “Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” Or as Marcus Aurelius put it, Tolerant with others, strict with yourself.

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responded with poise, even as he and his family were in mortal danger. “The nearer a man is to a calm mind,” he wrote of such moments of crisis, “the closer he is to strength.” A real man doesn’t give way to rage or panic, he reminded himself, willing himself to be like Antoninus. “Such a person has strength, courage and endurance,” he would say, “unlike the angry and complaining.”

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But he refused to betray even a hint of his suffering or rage. Caligula toasted to his health and the man drained his cup to the last drop. The emperor passed down some gifts and he accepted them. We can imagine Pastor sitting there, surrounded as he was by laughter and people, feeling the loneliest and saddest and angriest man in the world. Yet he shed no tears, uttered no harsh words, and otherwise acted as if his beloved boy had been spared from this act of capricious cruelty.

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Sometimes it’s having the strength to not do the thing you want to do more than anything else in the world. It’s holding back the most natural and understandable and forgivable feelings in the world: taking it personally. Running away. Breaking down. Locking up with fear. Celebrating with joy. Cursing in anger. Exacting retribution.

Ref. 973B-U

The first punch struck King with such force in the face that he spun around. The next blows came in rapid succession, landing on his head and back, filling the now-silent auditorium with the sickening sound of bone connecting with flesh. Septima Clark, in the audience, was stunned by this sudden burst of violence, not sure, at first, if it was part of a demonstration. But then she watched as King, gathering himself after the first onslaught, turned to face his assailant and drop his hands “like a newborn baby,” to receive more blows. As he was being beaten, in front of hundreds of people, he actually opened himself to his attacker, literally turning the other cheek, as the ultimate demonstration of the principles of nonviolence and Christian love.

Ref. 12FD-V

In 1952, Sandra Day O’Connor took a lawfully wedded vow to marry her husband, John Jay O’Connor. For nearly forty years, across overseas postings, political campaigns, and then the highest court in the land, she did as she promised, loving and cherishing, having and holding, for better or for worse. But in 1990, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, putting that notion of in sickness and in health to the very real test. At first, she would bring him to work with her each day so he would not be lonely. Sandra would ultimately give up her dream job—a job meant to be held for life—to take care of him, even as her beloved husband had trouble recognizing her.

Ref. E80C-W

Think of the Queen pushing through her annus horribilis. Anne Frank in her attic for twenty-five months, cheerfully writing in her journal. Stephen Hawking, forty years in a wheelchair from ALS. Marcus Aurelius, plagued by a lifelong stomach ailment, then wars and floods and an actual plague, reminding himself that nothing was unendurable (and that the only thing that wasn’t, our mortality, eventually solves that problem for us).

Ref. 4BF3-X