The Banquet of Life
This week you are sitting down to a banquet, and the question is not what the table holds but how you reach for it. Each day's passage hands you a different lens on the same feast: what you take, what you leave, how you feel about what arrives, and finally whether you can stop finding fault with the meal altogether. By Saturday you will have moved from the basic image of the banquet all the way to a harder challenge, one about your relationship with life's texture itself.
Passage
NOW WHEN WE have been invited to a banquet, we take what is set before us; and if a person should bid his host to set before him fish or cakes, he would be regarded as eccentric. Yet in the world at large we ask the gods for things which they do not give us, and that too when there are many things which they actually have given us.
— Epictetus, Fragments 17
Reflection
Yesterday the banquet taught you timing. Today Epictetus sharpens the point: when you sit down as a guest, you eat what the host sets out. You do not call out for different food. Yet outside the dinner party, in your actual life, that is exactly what you do with the gods, asking for what they have not given while overlooking what they have already placed on the table in front of you. The fragment is a small, dry observation, but it carries a sting. The inventory of what has already been given to you is probably longer than you have recently admitted.
Go deeper
What is something the gods, or life, or circumstance, have already placed in front of you this week that you have been too busy requesting something else to actually taste?
Practice
What Is Already on the Table
Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write three things you have been asking for, wishing were different, or expecting to arrive. On the right, write what has already been given in each corresponding area of your life. Spend the last two minutes simply reading the right-hand column slowly, without immediately moving to the left.