The Evening Review
The Evening Review is a Stoic practice of deliberately looking back over your day, judging your own actions against your own values, and using what you find to do better tomorrow. The Stoics had no single Greek term for it, but it grows from the broader practice of self-examination they called "episkepsis" (a Greek word meaning close inspection or scrutiny). This week you will learn what the Evening Review is, why the Stoics thought it was essential, and how to make it a living habit rather than just a ritual.
Passage
Ask yourself directly you awake from sleep: will it be of any moment to you, if just and right acts are blamed by another? No, it will not. Have you forgotten what these who plume themselves upon praise or censure of others are like at bed and board?
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations X.13
Reflection
The Evening Review begins, perhaps surprisingly, in the morning. Marcus Aurelius opens his day by asking whether anyone else's opinion of his actions will actually matter by nightfall. The question is a calibration tool: it reminds you, before the day begins, that the only judge worth satisfying is the one who will be reviewing the day at its end, which is you. The Evening Review works only if you have already decided that your own honest assessment outranks the praise or blame of others.
Go deeper
When you imagine reviewing today's actions tonight, whose verdict do you find yourself rehearsing, your own or someone else's, and what does that tell you about where you are placing your standard of judgment?
Practice
Set Your Own Standard
Before you do anything else today, write down one sentence finishing this prompt: 'Tonight, when I look back at today, the one thing I most want to be able to say I did well is...' Keep it somewhere you will see it this evening.