A friend is in the middle of a divorce and calls you every evening.
Take this situation apart. Each piece goes in one box: yours, or not yours. There is no third box, and almost nothing falls in one piece.
Yours
- Whether you pick up when it suits you rather than always.Being available is not the same as being unlimitedly available. Anyone who always answers manages a few weeks and then disappears.
- Whether you listen or start offering solutions.Most people call to be heard, not to receive a plan of action. Which of the two you give is a choice you make again every evening.
- Whether you say when it becomes too much for you.People file this piece in the wrong box, because it looks unkind. It is the opposite: a limit spoken in time keeps you useful, and staying silent until you drop away is the crueller of the two.
Not yours
- That he is unhappy.His marriage, his grief, his days. You can stand next to it and you cannot take it over, however much you would like to.
- Whether he follows your advice.What he does with your words is up to him. Anyone who measures his own usefulness by another person's obedience ends up angry at somebody who already has it hard.
- How long this is going to last.Divorces take as long as they take. Anyone counting on an end date ends up disappointed in a friend who can do nothing about it.
The reasoning. The Stoics distinguished feeling with someone from being pulled under with them, and did not regard the second as a deeper form of the first. That sounds cold until you see the columns: everything you can genuinely do for him sits on the right, and it is exactly the kind of thing that disappears the moment you exhaust yourself. A friend who is still there in three months is worth more than a friend who gave everything for three weeks.
- Show sympathy with the one who grieves, but do not let it sink in within you.Epictetus
Nearby situations
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