Your face goes hot before you've decided anything.
Your stomach drops when a certain name shows up on your phone.
Your jaw sets the second someone interrupts you.
Most of us treat that first jolt as the start of a fight.
We either obey it or we stamp it out.
The Stoics had a third option.
It starts by not being surprised by it.
This is one passage,
One passage from the Stoics and one practice to take into your day.
We start where it has to start,
The moment you get hijacked.
Here's Seneca writing to his friend Lucilius about a man who blushed when he was caught off guard.
Letter 11 in the Gemir translation.
For no wisdom can natural weakness of the body be removed.
That which is implanted and inborn can be toned down by training,
But not overcome.
And then a little further on.
Steadiest speaker when before the public often breaks into perspiration,
As if he had wearied or overheated himself,
Some tremble in the knees when they rise to speak.
Notice who Seneca is describing there.
People who are good at this.
The blush still comes.
The sweat still comes.
Training turns it down.
He says it does not switch off.
That matters because of how the Stoics thought the mind worked.
Something appears,
You agree or you don't.
You either assent to the impression,
You withhold it,
Or you disagree with it.
Then comes the urge,
Then the action.
The first jolt in your body belongs to that first step.
It happens to you.
It isn't something that you're agreeing to yet.
So the flinch,
That first movement,
The jolt is not the problem.
The problem is treating the Finch as a fully formed verdict.
My heart's pounding,
So this must be a threat.
Wrong.
I'm furious,
So therefore I must be right.
Wrong.
That second part,
That's the moment you sign for it.
And that part is the thing that needs to be questioned.
I call this principle the gap.
Between the jolt and what you do next,
There is a step,
And that step is yours.
But you can't use a gap that you can't see.
So the first practice is simply about seeing it.
This practice is called the flinch.
A trigger is your body moving first.
Heat in the face,
A tight chest,
A drop in the stomach.
The instruction in one word.
When you feel it,
Say to yourself,
Flinch.
That's all.
Don't obey it,
Just name it.
Flinch.
Today's rap is One Flinch,
Named once.
It still counts even if you name it after you've snapped.
It still counts as a rap.
Just name the flinch,
Let it be there,
Don't try to change it.
When you're done,
Make a mark,
Tick on a piece of paper,
A note on your phone.
Somewhere you'll see it.
Tonight.
By this evening,
The question is simple.
Did I name one flinch?
Yes or no?
You will never stop the jolt.
Seneca didn't.
And he was trying a lot harder than most of us ever will.
What you can stop is mistaking the flinch for a decision.
Next time,
Let's use that gap between the flinch and the verdict we make about it to do something productive.
Let's use it to find a way back to our senses when we've become a little bit irrational.
Go well.
