People do awful, frustrating, triggering things. They do it now…and they’ve done it for a long time. They find ways to insult us, demean us, humiliate us, degrade us. Marcus Aurelius would say they do this because they don’t know good from evil, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt and it isn’t unfair.

Back in the 1940s, a young Bill Russell watched his father Charles be repeatedly snubbed by a white employee at a gas station, who deliberately serviced cars that had arrived after theirs. Finally Charles had enough and was about to drive off when the employee pulled a gun on the Russells. “Boy,” the man said menacingly, “don’t you ever do what you just started to do.”

Done with being kicked around, Charles grabbed a tire iron from his trunk and stepped towards the man who was used to bullying without consequences. In an instant, the man realized he had messed with the wrong person and ran off.

Russell and his brother celebrated wildly from inside the car. Their father had struck back. Their father couldn’t be messed with. He had scared away a white man in Louisiana. Yet when their father returned to the car, he ordered them to stop cheering. He was no hero. He had made a huge mistake.

“I didn’t have hold of myself,” their father explained later. “I know deep down that I’da hit that man with that iron if he hadn’t run off. I’d have ended his life and ruined mine, plus my kid’s and my wife’s, just cause some fool was using me as a boy in front of my family. I let him take full possession of me, a grown man. I don’t even like to think about it.”

While many of the Stoics were powerful, plenty of them would have understood the indignity and frustration. Epictetus was a literal slave. Musonius Rufus, his teacher, was exiled four times. Seneca was not only subservient to Nero but to Claudius, who foisted trumped-up charges upon Seneca and ordered his exile. Think of Stockdale, seven and a half years as a POW, at the mercy of those guards. They too would have tired of being kicked around, they would have been subjected to all sorts of injustices. They had their freedom taken from them.

Yet…yet… they also understood that the greatest empire was command of themselves, which is what part two of Discipline is Destiny is all about–controlling our temperament and emotions (by the way, Discipline is Destiny is over 50% off right now on Amazon for the next two days!). They understood that getting angry, being consumed by their very understandable desire for revenge, was the hand over possession of whatever self was theirs. They understood that the consequences of flying off the handle or acting impulsively affected not just themselves but their families and fellow human beings.

And so it goes for you too. We must retain possession of ourselves. We must get a hold of ourselves. No matter what they do to us. No matter how unfair or frustrating life (and bullies) can be.

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