In 1965, the American naval aviator James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam. Hanging from his parachute, he later said, he thought: I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus; he had come to know the Discourses as an officer and reread them often. What followed: nearly eight years as a prisoner of war, four of them in solitary confinement, with repeated torture and a leg that never healed. As the senior officer he organized his fellow prisoners' resistance, with rules of conduct for under torture, and he disfigured himself rather than appear in a propaganda film. He survived, received his country's highest military decoration, and said plainly for the rest of his life: Epictetus had carried him through the prison.
Losing everything a person can lose except life itself: freedom, health, contact, sense of time, and no guarantee whatsoever that it will ever end.
The cell, the guards and the duration: not his, and hoping for a quick end proved dangerous there; those who kept expecting to be home by Christmas broke. What remained his: his role as commander, his rules, his answer from minute to minute. Two thousand years after Nicopolis, a prison in Hanoi proved that the sorting is no armchair philosophy.
Stockdale combined sober honesty about the facts with confidence in the ending. Where in your life do you confuse hope with a deadline, and what would change if you pulled those two apart?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases