Cleanthes came to Athens as an impoverished boxer, with four drachmas in his pocket, wanting to study philosophy under Zeno. Studying costs time and time costs money, so he solved it with his hands: by night he drew water for the gardens and kneaded dough for a baker, by day he sat in the colonnade. The Athenians mockingly called him the Well-Drawer. When the authorities once summoned him to explain how a man like him lived without visible income, he called the gardener and the baker's wife as witnesses. The court was so impressed that it voted him ten minae from the public treasury; Zeno forbade him to accept it. After Zeno's death, the Well-Drawer led the Stoa, nineteen years of study later.
Being too poor for the life you want, and being able to decide every single day that it is too hard.
His origins, his poverty and the mockery: not his. His nights, his hands and his persistence: his. Cleanthes did not calculate whether it was feasible; he did tonight what tonight allowed, for nineteen years.
What would you give to learn what you really want to learn? And which circumstance are you currently using as the reason it cannot be done, while somewhere a bucket stands ready?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases