Free of Hope and Fear
This week you are learning about being "free of hope and fear," a state the Stoics sometimes called apatheia (in Greek, "a-PATH-ee-ah"), which simply means freedom from the disruptive passions that jerk us around. Hope and fear are a matched pair: both are the mind running ahead of the present moment, grasping at what might go well or bracing against what might go badly. Neither is happening right now, yet both can consume your entire day. The Stoics did not want you to become cold or indifferent; they wanted you to stop being a hostage to events that exist only in your imagination.
Passage
Yet if we were afraid, not of death or exile, but of fear itself, then we should practise how not to encounter those things that appear evil to us.
— Epictetus, Discourses 2.16.19
Reflection
Epictetus makes his sharpest point of the week: the real problem is not death or exile or pain; it is our fear of those things. We spend enormous energy arranging life to avoid what we fear, but we spend almost no energy learning not to be afraid. This is the turn that takes you beyond the coping strategies of the earlier days. Being free of hope and fear, what the Stoics called apatheia, does not mean you feel nothing; it means you are no longer governed by these passions. You practice responding to what is actually in front of you rather than managing an elaborate internal theater of futures that may never arrive.
Go deeper
If you were not afraid of your fear itself, what would you do differently, or approach more directly, in your life right now?
Practice
Fear of Fear
Sit quietly for five minutes. Bring to mind something you have been avoiding, not because of the thing itself but because of the anxious feeling it produces when you think about it. Notice the fear of the feeling, separate from the thing. Try to stay with the discomfort of noticing it for two minutes without either pushing it away or catastrophizing. Just let it be present without acting on it.