Your Work as a Human Being
This week you will think carefully about what it means to do the work you were made for. The seven passages move from self-knowledge to social responsibility to integration, asking you to hold two things together at once: the particular shape of your own nature and the larger human calling that no one gets to skip. By Saturday you will have a clearer sense of what those two things demand of you, together.
Passage
Everybody, however, must resolutely hold fast to his own peculiar gifts, in so far as they are peculiar only and not vicious, in order that propriety, which is the object of our inquiry, may the more easily be secured. For we must so act as not to oppose the universal laws of human nature, but, while safeguarding those, to follow the bent of our own particular nature; and even if other careers should be better and nobler, we may still regulate our own pursuits by the standard of our own nature. For it is of no avail to fight against one's nature or to aim at what is impossible of attainment. From this fact the nature of that propriety defined above comes into still clearer light, inasmuch as nothing is proper that "goes against the grain," as the saying is — that is, if it is in direct opposition to one's natural genius.
— Cicero, On Duties 1.110
Reflection
Cicero returns, but now he says something that cuts against easy self-acceptance: hold fast to your peculiar gifts, yes, but only insofar as they are not vicious. The permission to be yourself is not unlimited. Within that boundary, though, the instruction is firm: do not fight against your own grain. Other paths may be better and nobler in the abstract, but 'it is of no avail to fight against one's nature or to aim at what is impossible of attainment.' This is a different kind of honesty than the earlier days required. It asks you to stop comparing yourself to a better nature you do not have, and to work faithfully with the one you do.
Go deeper
What is the nobler or better path you have been using, perhaps unconsciously, as a standard against which your actual nature always falls short, and what would it cost you to stop making that comparison?
Practice
Against the Grain
Think of one way you regularly try to work against your own grain, pushing yourself to be a kind of person your nature resists, not because growth requires it, but because you believe you should be different than you are. Write a single honest sentence describing what that looks like in practice. Then write a second sentence beginning: 'What my actual nature does well, and what the work in front of me actually needs, is...' Read both sentences aloud.