Quote of the Week...from Epictetus

We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how to respond to them.
                                                                                                                  ---Epictetus

I found on the Web an alternative quote, also by Epictetus : It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.  The message is similar in both cases: each of us has been placed in this world under our own unique and often very inequitable circumstances.  We can change some of those circumstances, but that comes under how we choose to respond to them, doesn't it?  And then again, there are things we have little or no power over in our lives, and it does us and no one else any good to focus our energies and attention on them.  So yes, reacting or responding to whatever happens with our circumstances requires a sense of discernment that weighs the relative importance of things along with the degree of control we might have to change things should we decide to go down that path...

Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher living in the late first century and early second century AD, a contemporary of the writers of the Greek New Testament in the Bible.  Born a slave in Asia Minor and later in his life banished from Rome back to Greece, he certainly had his own personal circumstances to contend with.  Although his philosophy emphasized the supremacy of human reasoning over the salvation through faith expressed by early Christians, some of the wisdom he imparted seems to overlap that found in writings from James and Paul...

Whether or not I can change my circumstances, my own focus should not be those circumstances, but rather my own behavior in regard to them.  Sometimes my circumstances are the consequences of things that I just did.  For example, this morning I was foolishly walking around in the pitch blackness of the front of my house around six when I walked, full-force, into a wall, my forehead split open in a couple of places.  I didn't just stand there angry at myself for colliding with the wall.  No, I logically screamed out in pain, bringing out Melissa to help me get through my crisis.  The bleeding was squelched, ice was applied, and now I have a couple of cuts above my eye that will be healing for awhile.  As for looking back on my circumstance, I learned to be more careful in the dark...better yet, keep on a little light.  But I'm not sitting around bemoaning what happened: I'm moving on, chastened but wiser...