Chapter 4: Rehearsing Hard Things So They Lose Their Power

The Night Before the Driving Test

Kwesi is seventeen, and tomorrow morning at nine he will take his driving test. He has practised for months with his aunt, who is patient and calm in the passenger seat. He can reverse around a corner, park between two cars and stop smoothly at a crossing. On a good day, he drives well. But tonight he is not thinking about good days. He is thinking about everything that could go wrong.

What if he stalls the engine at the start? What if he forgets to check the mirror? What if the examiner is strict and unfriendly? What if a child runs into the road? What if he fails, and his friends ask him about it, and he has to tell them? Each picture comes with a small wave of panic. He tries to push the pictures away and think about something else, but they keep coming back.

His aunt sees him sitting on the stairs looking pale. She sits down beside him and asks what is wrong. When he tells her, she surprises him. Instead of saying, "Do not think about it," she says, "All right. Let us think about it properly. Let us go through the worst things one at a time and see what you would do."

So they do. If he stalls, he will put the car in neutral, start the engine again and carry on. Examiners see stalls every day. If he forgets a mirror, he will check it as soon as he remembers. If the examiner is unfriendly, that is the examiner's character, not a judgment of Kwesi. If a child runs into the road, he will do exactly what he has practised: brake firmly and safely. And if he fails? Then he will feel disappointed, book another test and practise the parts that went wrong. Many good drivers failed their first test.

After twenty minutes, Kwesi feels different. The fears have not disappeared, but they have changed shape. Before, they were vague and huge. Now they are specific and manageable. Each one has an answer. Without knowing it, his aunt has taught him one of the oldest Stoic practices.

It is worth noticing what his aunt did not do. She did not tell him that nothing would go wrong, because she could not promise that. She did not tell him to stop being silly, because his fear was real to him. She took his fears seriously enough to look at them one by one. That is often the kindest thing we can do for a frightened person, and also for our own frightened mind: not to wave the fear away, but to sit down beside it and ask, "And then what would happen?"

Seneca's Strange Advice

The Stoics had a practice that is often known by the Latin name praemeditatio malorum, which means something like "thinking ahead about troubles". In this book, I will call it rehearsing hardship. The idea is to imagine, calmly and on purpose, the difficult things that could happen, so that if they do happen, they do not take us completely by surprise.

This can seem like the opposite of everything in the last chapter. There, we saw Seneca telling his friend not to rush out to meet future troubles. Here, the Stoics seem to tell us to go looking for them. But the two ideas fit together. The worry of the last chapter is uncontrolled. It arrives on its own, repeats itself and leaves us exhausted. Rehearsing hardship is controlled. We choose the time, we look at one trouble clearly, we decide how we would meet it, and then we stop.

Seneca describes the practice clearly in a letter written when his friend Lucilius was worried about a lawsuit. Lucilius feared that the case would go badly, and he wrote to Seneca for comfort. Seneca says, in my own words, that he will not comfort his friend by telling him to hope for the best. Instead, he will lead him to peace by another road. Imagine the worst outcome, Seneca says. Measure it. Look at it closely. You will find that what you fear is either not great or not long (Seneca, Letters 24).

In another letter, Seneca writes about a terrible fire that destroyed a whole city in a single night. A friend of his had been born there and was overwhelmed with grief. Seneca reflects that disasters strike most heavily when they are completely unexpected. Therefore, he says, nothing should be unexpected by us. We should send our minds ahead to meet every possibility: illness, loss, change, danger. Not to frighten ourselves, but so that the mind is not caught unprepared (Seneca, Letters 91).

There is wisdom in this. When something bad happens that we had never imagined, we suffer twice. We suffer the event itself, and we also suffer the shock of a world that has suddenly broken its promise. Rehearsing hardship cannot remove the first kind of suffering. But it can soften the second kind, because we already know, in a quiet part of the mind, that such things are possible in a human life.

Practising Poverty and Preparing for People

Seneca also suggested a more physical form of rehearsal. In one letter, he advises Lucilius to set aside a few days now and then to live very simply. Eat only a little plain food, wear rough clothes and ask yourself, "Is this what I was afraid of?" (Seneca, Letters 18). Soldiers, he points out, practise their drills in times of peace, so that they are ready when war comes. In the same way, we can practise hardship while we are safe, so that its face is familiar if we ever meet it.

Seneca was a very wealthy man, and it is fair to notice that a rich person choosing to eat plain food for a few days is not the same as a poor person who has no choice. Seneca knew this. His point was not that poverty is easy. His point was that our fear of losing comfort is often much larger than the actual experience of living with less. By touching that experience briefly, on purpose, we discover that we are stronger than our fear believed.

Epictetus suggested something similar for everyday situations. Before you go to do something, he said, remind yourself what that activity is usually like. If you are going to the public baths, picture the people splashing, pushing, shouting and stealing. Then you can say, "I want to bathe, and I also want to keep my mind in harmony with nature." In this way, if something annoying happens, you will be ready to say, "This was not the only thing I wanted. I also wanted to stay calm" (Epictetus, Enchiridion 4).

Marcus Aurelius used rehearsal every morning to prepare for difficult people. He began a famous note by telling himself that today he would meet people who were interfering, ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, jealous and unfriendly (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1). This sounds gloomy, but it was not. Marcus went on to remind himself that such people act this way because they do not know good from bad, that they are his relatives in the human family and that none of them can truly harm his character. By expecting difficulty in the morning, he could meet it in the afternoon with patience instead of shock. We will return to this note in a later chapter.

All these practices share a pattern. First, picture the difficulty clearly and specifically. Second, notice that it is survivable, often smaller or shorter than the fear suggested. Third, decide how you would like to meet it. Fourth, return to the present. That last part is essential. Rehearsal is a short visit to a possible future, not a place to live.

Selin and the Interview

Selin is thirty-three. She has worked for six years in the same accounts office and has finally applied for a better position in another organization. To her delight, she has been invited to an interview. To her dismay, she has been unable to sleep properly since the invitation arrived.

Her mind keeps offering frightening scenes. She will be asked a question she cannot answer. Her voice will shake. She will go blank. The people on the panel will look at each other with pity. Each scene makes her want to cancel the interview and stay where she is, safe and bored.

A friend suggested that she try something different. Instead of pushing the scenes away, Selin sat down one evening with a notebook and wrote each fear at the top of a page. "I am asked a question I cannot answer." Underneath, she wrote what she would do. She could say honestly that she had not met that exact situation, explain how she would approach it and mention a similar problem she had solved. "My voice shakes." She could pause, take a sip of water and continue. Interviewers know that people are nervous. "I go blank." She could ask them to repeat the question, which is a perfectly normal request.

Then she wrote the hardest page: "I do not get the job." Underneath, she wrote: "I will feel disappointed for a few days. I will still have my current job. I will ask for feedback and use it next time. I will have practised interviewing, which will make the next one easier." When she read the page back, the worst outcome looked like what Seneca promised: not great and not long.

On the day of the interview, Selin was still nervous. Her hands were cold, and her first answer came out too fast. But when a difficult question came, she did not freeze. She recognized it as one of the scenes she had rehearsed, and her prepared answer came back to her. Whether she got the job is not the point of this story. The point is that she walked into the room as a person who had already met her fears on paper, and that made her steadier than the person who had only run away from them.

Teodor and the Solo

Teodor is fifty-six and has sung in a community choir for many years. He loves singing with others, hidden inside the sound of thirty voices. This year, the choir leader asked him to sing a short solo in the spring concert. He said yes, and then immediately wished he had said no.

For Teodor, the worst fear was very specific. He was afraid of forgetting the words in front of everyone. He imagined the silence, the eyes of the audience and the slow walk back to his place. The fear grew so large that he began to think about pretending to be ill on the day of the concert.

One evening, he decided to rehearse not only the song but also the disaster. He stood in his living room and imagined himself forgetting the words. Then he asked himself, "What would I actually do?" He could hum the melody for a line until the words came back. He could glance at the choir leader, who would mouth the words to him. He could simply start the verse again. He even practised these recoveries, deliberately stopping in the middle of the song and finding his way back.

Something interesting happened. The more Teodor practised recovering from a mistake, the less afraid he was of making one. The disaster had become a small, familiar problem with three possible solutions. On the night of the concert, he did lose one word in the second verse. He hummed for half a line, the word came back, and almost nobody noticed. Afterwards, his wife told him that his voice had sounded warm and confident. He laughed and said that it was because he had already forgotten the words a hundred times at home.

Teodor's story shows an important point about rehearsal. It is most useful when it ends in action. Imagining a disaster and then stopping there can make fear worse. Imagining a disaster and then practising what to do next turns fear into readiness.

Many trades use this idea without calling it philosophy. Pilots practise emergencies in training so that the right actions become automatic. Swimmers practise what to do if they get a cramp. Teachers think in advance about what they will do if a lesson goes badly or a fire alarm rings. In each case, the purpose is not to expect disaster every minute. It is to free the mind from panic, so that if a difficulty comes, a calm plan is already waiting.

Ines and the Simple Weekend

Ines is forty-one and works for herself as a graphic designer. Her income goes up and down from month to month. In good months, she enjoys small comforts: meals out, new books, a taxi home when she is tired. In quiet months, a deep fear rises in her. What if the work stops completely? What if she cannot pay for the things she is used to?

After reading Seneca's letter about practising poverty, Ines decided to try a gentle version. One weekend each season, she lives on a very small budget. She cooks simple meals from what is already in the cupboard, walks instead of taking taxis, borrows books from the library and spends her evenings talking with friends instead of going out. At the end of the weekend, she asks herself Seneca's question: "Is this what I was afraid of?"

The first time, she was surprised by her own answer. The weekend was not miserable. Parts of it were even pleasant. She slept well, she enjoyed the walking and she discovered that a pot of soup and a long conversation could make a very good evening. Her fear of having less had been much larger than the actual experience of having less.

Ines is careful to say that her simple weekends are a choice made from a position of safety, and that real hardship is something else. She does not pretend to know what it is like to have no choice at all. But she has found that, after these weekends, quiet months frighten her less. She now knows that a simpler life would not destroy her. That knowledge gives her a kind of freedom that a fuller bank account alone never gave her.

This practice is not for everyone. Some people already live with very little, and for them the idea of practising hardship would make no sense. But for anyone whose worry is mainly about losing comfort, a short, chosen taste of simplicity can be a useful way to test whether the fear is as large as it seems.

Practical Steps: Rehearsing Well

The first step is to choose a time. Rehearsing hardship works best when you decide to do it, at a time of day when you feel reasonably calm, for a limited period. Ten or twenty minutes is usually enough. Avoid doing it late at night or when you are already very upset, because then it can turn into ordinary worry.

The second step is to pick one specific difficulty. Not "everything that could go wrong", but one clear scene. "I stall the car at the start of the test." "I am asked a question I cannot answer." "I lose a word in the solo." The more specific the scene, the easier it is to prepare for it.

The third step is to look at the scene honestly and ask Seneca's question: how large is this, and how long would it last? Imagine the hour after it happens, the day after and the month after. Often you will find that even the worst version is survivable, and that its pain would fade with time.

The fourth step is the most important: decide what you would do. Write down one or two actions. If possible, practise them, as Teodor practised finding his way back into the song. This step turns imagination into preparation. Without it, rehearsal can become simple fear.

The fifth step is to close the rehearsal and return to the present. You might say to yourself, "I have looked at this. I know what I would do. Now I will continue with my day." Then do something ordinary and physical: make a drink, tidy a shelf, take a short walk. Let the mind know that the visit to the future is over.

You can also rehearse with someone else, as Kwesi did with his aunt. A calm friend or family member can ask, "And what would you do then?" and help you find answers you could not see alone. Choose someone who will take your fears seriously without making them bigger. If there is nobody like that nearby, a notebook can play the same role. Writing the question and then writing the answer slows the mind down and makes it more practical.

A word of care. For some people, imagining difficult scenes makes their worry much stronger instead of weaker, even when they follow these steps. If that happens to you, stop. Not every practice suits every person. If you live with very strong or constant fear, it is best to work on it with a doctor or another qualified professional, who can guide you safely and at the right pace.

Rehearsing Good Things Too

Rehearsal is usually described as a way of preparing for hardship. But some people find that it also works in another direction. If you can rehearse a difficult moment and your calm response to it, you can also rehearse an ordinary or even a good outcome, so that your mind has more than one picture to look at.

Worry tends to give us only one picture: the worst one. When we rehearse, we look at that picture on purpose and find our response. Afterwards, it can help to look briefly at two more pictures: the most likely outcome and a good outcome. Selin, before her interview, imagined not only freezing at a hard question, but also an ordinary interview with a few good answers and a few weaker ones, and a good interview in which she and the panel had a real conversation. None of these pictures was a prediction. Together, they reminded her that the future had many possible shapes.

This is not the same as "positive thinking" that insists everything will be fine. The Stoics would not have liked that, because it is a guess dressed up as a certainty, and it leaves us unprepared. The aim is balance. A mind that can see the bad, the ordinary and the good possibilities clearly is more accurate than a mind that sees only one of them.

Marcus' morning note is a good model. He expected to meet difficult people, but he also reminded himself of their shared humanity and of his own power to act well. His rehearsal did not end in gloom. It ended in a clear, calm intention for the day. That is the spirit of rehearsal at its best.

A Short Exercise: The Rehearsal Card

This exercise turns the steps of rehearsal into a small card that you can carry with you. It is useful before a specific event that worries you: a test, an interview, a difficult conversation, a medical appointment or a performance.

Take a small card or a piece of paper that fits in your pocket. At the top, write the event and the date. Below that, write the one difficulty you fear most. Keep it to one sentence. Under it, write two short answers to Seneca's question: "How large would this be?" and "How long would it last?" For example: "Large for a few minutes, embarrassing for a day, forgotten in a month."

Then, in the middle of the card, write your plan: one or two actions you would take if the difficulty happened. Keep them simple enough to remember under pressure. "Pause, sip water, ask them to repeat the question." "Put the car in neutral, restart, continue." "Say, 'I need a moment to think about that.'" If you can, practise these actions once or twice before the event, out loud or in movement, so that they are ready in your body as well as in your head.

At the bottom of the card, write a sentence for returning to the present. This is the sentence you will say to yourself when the rehearsal is over and whenever the fear returns before the event. It might be, "I have prepared. Now I will live today." It might be a line from the old writers, in your own words, such as, "It may come, or it may not. In the meantime, it is not here."

Carry the card until the event is over. When the fear rises, take out the card and read it once, slowly. Do not add to it or start a new rehearsal. The card is a reminder that the work is already done. After the event, turn the card over and write what actually happened and what you learned. Keep the cards together. Over time, they become a small collection of evidence that you can meet difficulties more calmly than your fear predicted.

Kwesi kept his card in the pocket of his jacket during his driving test. He did not need to take it out. Knowing it was there, he said, was enough.

Chapter Summary

The Stoics practised rehearsing hardship: calmly imagining difficult things in advance, so that they would not be caught unprepared. Seneca told his anxious friend to measure the worst outcome and see that it was either not great or not long (Letters 24). He suggested living simply for a few days to ask, "Is this what I feared?" (Letters 18), and he wrote that nothing should be completely unexpected by us (Letters 91). Epictetus advised picturing what an activity is usually like before starting it (Enchiridion 4), and Marcus prepared each morning to meet difficult people (Meditations 2.1).

Rehearsal differs from worry because it is chosen, specific, limited in time and ends in action and a return to the present. Kwesi on the stairs, Selin with her notebook, Teodor practising his recoveries and Ines with her simple weekends all found that a fear looked at clearly becomes smaller than a fear that is only run away from.

In the next chapter, we will turn to one of the most personal sources of worry: our own bodies and our health.