Another mini Stoic lesson

Ellie Goulding-Explosions

I've put up the following quote before but I am posting this again especially as a reminder to me.

If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.

-Socrates

Without getting too detailed into where this coming from I will say this. I do think the above statement is true and yet I still I struggle with accepting change and have so for quite some time now. In fact, I have an intrinsic fear of change to the point where I essentially become riddled with anxiety as I seek to figure out what I can control. This is tough because my beliefs in fatalism run deep and it sometimes makes things difficult for to recognize what things I can control. The Stoics believed in fatalism, but also embedded into their ideology was the notion to only be concerned with  things we can control and things we can partially control. I would like to think that one-hundred percent of the time we always have control of how we react to things so maybe that's the place to start. More on this later...