There is a lot fighting for it, fighting in it. There’s the media. There’s distraction. There are devices and entertainment. There’s what happened in the recent past. There is the worry of what might happen in your future. There’s our intrusive thoughts. There are incorrect impressions, misinformation. There’s the voices of the people around us, the judgements, the doubts, the conventions.

All of these things are vying for what military strategists today would call “the battlespace.” Our mind is a contested bit of territory, with many people seeking to control what we call “the empire between your ears” in The Girl Who Would Be Free. Why? Because your brain, your attention, is valuable. People want you to think about certain things and not think about certain things–because it’s good for business, because it makes you easier to control.

So you must dominate this battlespace. It is you who must assert yourself over yourself. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about the need to winnow his thoughts, not let his mind wander, so that if asked “What are you thinking about?” he could answer clearly and without shame. We too must grab the reins of our mind, set up boundaries against distraction, push away intrusive thoughts, tune out nonsense and noise. That’s what Stoicism is, as we wrote recently, it’s the gladiator stepping out into the arena of the mind, dominating the battlespace, controlling their own mind…because the alternative–letting the enemy dominate, letting your mind be controlled by someone or something else–is just unthinkable.

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