The Practice: The same hospital

The advice you keep giving may be the advice you need.

I was telling someone to take one clean week away from a habit.

It was good advice. Clear, practical and proportionate. Don’t solve the rest of your life. Just make it through one week without returning to the pattern.

Even as I said it, I felt the catch.

I wasn’t holding myself to the same standard. The particulars were different, but I knew what it was like to keep returning to something after deciding I wouldn’t. I knew how easily a clean commitment becomes a negotiation.

Clients sometimes think they are coming to benefit from my wisdom. That isn’t quite how it feels from this side.

I might be the person asking the questions, but they show me things about myself constantly. The conversation becomes a mirror facing in both directions.

The advice was still right. I meant every word of it.

I was simply another patient handing over a remedy I had not been taking consistently myself.

The source

Seneca, Letters 27.1, in Gummere’s translation: “I am not so shameless as to undertake to cure my fellow-men when I am ill myself. I am, however, discussing with you troubles which concern us both, and sharing the remedy with you, just as if we were lying ill in the same hospital.” Seneca wrote that while extremely rich, extremely powerful and thoroughly compromised, which is exactly why it is worth reading. He is not claiming to have arrived. He is claiming the right to discuss the treatment while still on the ward, which is a much smaller claim than most people teaching this material make, and a much more defensible one.

The drill

Write down the three pieces of advice you give other people most often. The automatic ones, at work or at home or over coffee. Then mark each honestly: doing it, not doing it, or doing it badly. No plan attached and no resolution, just the marks. Most people find at least one line they have been dispensing for years and have not run themselves in months. The value is not the guilt. It is seeing precisely which ward you are standing on while you hand out the remedy.

From the archives

If you want the version of this with a more famous patient, Marcus Aurelius Was Terrible at Stoicism reads the passages most Stoicism channels skip: the two getting-out-of-bed arguments four books apart, the procrastination confession, and the old distinction between the sage and the Stoic in training.

Which line do you give most often and follow least? Reply with it.

Go well,
Jon.