Loss and Attachment
This week you sit with one of the hardest facts of being alive: everything you love can be taken from you, and one day will be. The seven passages move you from a first, bracing reframe of loss, through the disciplines of gratitude and presence, into a final resting place that no one and nothing can touch. By Saturday you will have something sturdier than consolation.
Passage
And what is the law of God? To guard what is his own, not to lay claim to what is not his own, but to make use of what is given him, and not to yearn for what has not been given; when something is taken away, to give it up readily and without delay, being grateful for the time in which he had the use of it—all this if you do not wish to be crying for your nurse and your mammy!
— Epictetus, Discourses 2.16.28
Reflection
Yesterday you named the loans. Today Epictetus spells out what living inside that loan actually looks like as a practice: use what is given, do not yearn for what was not given, and when something is taken, release it 'readily and without delay.' The phrase that bites is the last one. Crying for your nurse and your mammy is Epictetus at his most blunt: clinging to what is gone is a kind of refusal to grow up into the real terms of existence. Gratitude, he says, is not a feeling to wait for; it is the active acknowledgment of the time you were given.
Go deeper
Where in your life right now are you yearning for something that was never actually given to you, and how is that yearning shaping what you do with what you do have?
Practice
Grateful for the Time
Choose one thing from yesterday's loan list that you have already lost, or that you feel slipping. Write three to five sentences describing what the 'time of use' actually gave you. Be specific: not 'it made me happy' but what exact moments, capacities, or connections it produced. Close by writing: 'I was grateful for the time.' Say it aloud once.