X. When You Are Trapped: What to Do

Sometimes the situation cannot be fixed. Seneca describes how to hold steady inside it.

Sometimes you will find yourself in a situation you did not choose and cannot escape. A circumstance you walked into without understanding what it would cost, or one that Fortune forced upon you. You cannot untie it. You cannot break it.

The people in chains suffer most in the beginning, when the metal is new and the restriction is still a shock. After they have made up their minds to endure rather than rage, something changes. Habit comes. What was unbearable becomes bearable, then ordinary.

We are all chained to Fortune. Every one of us. Some chains are loose and made of gold, some are tight and made of iron. The essential situation is the same: none of us are free of the conditions we were born into or fell into. What varies is the chain, not the captivity.

Even those who have bound others are bound themselves. The person who seems most in control is often the most trapped, by the responsibilities of their position, by the expectations they have created, by the machinery they set in motion that now runs them.

All life is a kind of captivity. The wise response is not to rage against it but to find, within whatever space is available, the good that is actually there. No condition is so bad that an honest mind finds nothing in it worth having. The art is in looking for what is there rather than mourning what is not.