The Mindset We All Need (IM 916)

It is to meditate on the wrong and evil things that can happen in the future and prepare ourselves to become mentally and emotionally strong. It's to be aware that bad things are inevitable.

This is the mindset we all desperately need...

We all try to pacify other people if something goes wrong to them and in their life. But when it comes to us we get devastated and can't handle the situation.

Why?

Because we lack this mindset to prepare ourselves from wrong happenings. Stoics call this Premeditatio malorum. In his Moral Letters, Seneca, the Stoic philosopher said:

“To-day it is you who threaten me with these terrors; but I have always threatened myself with them, and have prepared myself as a man to meet man’s destiny. If an evil has been pondered beforehand, the blow is gentle when it comes. To the fool, however, and to him who trusts in fortune, each event as it arrives “comes in a new and sudden form,” and a large part of evil, to the inexperienced, consists in its novelty. This is proved by the fact that men endure with greater courage, when they have once become accustomed to them, the things which they had at first regarded as hardships. Hence, the wise man accustoms himself to coming trouble, lightening by long reflection the evils which others lighten by long endurance.”

This stoic art of negative visualization was accompanied by the great Stoic Philosopher from Epictetus to Seneca to Marcus Aurelius

By doing this exercise, Seneca was always prepared for disruption and always working that disruption into his plans.  And this is the exact mindset we all need right now.