“The moment you are disturbed by insult or pleased by praise, you are still a slave.”
Marcus Aurelius
Sometimes we think freedom means having enough money that nobody can tell you what to do. I believed that for a long time, but I was wrong about it. You can have the company, the title, the house, and still be run by whoever walked into the room and disrupted you, because the thing that owns a man is not his balance sheet. It’s what he resonates with.
Your body is a temple. It’s also a tuning fork. Strike it and it rings, and the tone tells you what’s actually in there. Most men spend their whole lives managing the sound instead of asking what’s making it.
I got struck twice this week, once from each direction.
The first one came from a courtroom I wasn’t standing in. Two and a half years I’ve been carrying a legal matter, and this week I expected it to end. Instead, the case got moved to administrative postponement until next April. Nine more months of waiting for closure on something that has already taken years off my life.
I could be upset about that. I could tell you the system is flawed and this isn’t fair and my life isn’t fair. I’m not going to do it. Everything is designed exactly the way it’s supposed to be, and every piece is falling into place exactly the way it was designed, and if I find that unacceptable it’s because I don’t understand the purpose of the plan yet. That isn’t my job to know. My job is to be a good steward of whatever comes down my way, learn from the hard parts, and appreciate the blessings.
The second strike came the same morning, and it was softer, and it got closer.
I took a man who works with me up in the plane for the first time. Clear morning, smooth air, about as good a day as you get for somebody’s first time in a small aircraft. Once we were up, I walked him through what my hands and feet were actually doing, because most people assume it’s all in the yoke. It isn’t. You roll the airplane into a bank and the nose wants to swing the other way, so you feed in rudder to hold it where it belongs. That’s a coordinated turn. There’s an instrument on the panel called the turn coordinator that tells you whether you’ve got it, and once you’ve flown enough you feel it in your seat before you ever look down at it.
Then I brought it in and set it down, and while we were rolling out he told me that landing was a lot smoother than he thought it was going to be.
He said it like a compliment, but it wasn’t one!
And I noticed something. I liked it!
I’ve been flying for years. Nothing about my ability changed between the runway and that sentence. But something in me went looking for that tone and I lit up when I got it.
Here’s what I know from where I sit today. Those are not two different problems. A man who gets moved by the courtroom and a man who gets moved by the compliment are the same man, and he is being fed from the outside because something on the inside went quiet.
That’s the part nobody tells you. Every one of us is getting fed somewhere. The business feeds you. The room full of people who think you’ve got it together feeds you. Being right feeds you. Being needed feeds you. And you don’t notice any of it while it’s working, because a thing that’s feeding you does not announce itself. It just keeps showing up at dinner.
So the question isn’t whether you’re being fed. You are. The question is what stopped. Whatever the outside is handing you right now, something else used to hand it to you, or was supposed to. Go find the thing that went silent, and put a rough year on it.
This week’s lesson: If a stranger’s opinion can move you, the opinion isn’t strong. You’re empty, and you’ll take a meal from anywhere.
