“A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” – Marcus Aurelius

At the start of 2020 I wrote a post about preparing for the difficulties of the year ahead, ‘Be Extraordinary, Accept Adversity’, and it contained the following….

“Again: which adversities are likely? You can’t get work / you can’t get the work you want / lack of opportunity / you can’t get your project off the ground / problems in your personal life distract you from your work.

Given that we know roughly what the problems are going to be, is it not reasonable to equip ourselves with a little philosophy in order to help us cope with them?”

Naturally, these paragraphs were written before the global pandemic hit, and so I failed to include it in the list of adversities.  It would seem, like much else in 2020, that the pandemic has made a mockery of these words, especially ‘given that we know roughly what the problems are going to be…’

However, in another companion post at the start of the year I wrote…

“Our intention as we take our first step forward then, must be an optimistic, learning intention. Those who get their work done are those who know that setbacks are neither permanent nor pervasive – but are temporary and isolated. Further, they know that everything that happens to them, everything, is information. No journey is wasted, there are no catastrophes if we extrapolate lessons from the experience. For it is our experience that provides us with ideas for our future.”

None of us could have predicted the coming of a once-a-century pandemic. And despite vaccines, none of us can be quite sure how it will play out. The pandemic has ruthlessly demonstrated that we have even less than the meagre amount of control over our own destiny than we thought we had. Twenty year projects have been wiped out, incomes and careers destroyed, years of honest graft undone, theatres closed and movies scrapped. On the surface it would seem a hopeless mess.

Where can we find peace in all this? Where is the optimism? Perhaps simply this; there is still so much that we have left to learn, and that everything we face, no matter how rare or how overwhelming it may seem, is, in essence,  just another obstacle.

The opportunity to learn is the source of optimism, and the obstacle is the opportunity. New obstacles lead us to new knowledge, and so we expand. There is still so much we don’t know, there is still so much for us to learn, therefore we have plenty of growing ahead of us. We are not stuck.

To return to Marcus Aurelius; “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”

Fire feeds on obstacles.

Be like fire.

RELATED READING
Some Practical Philosophy
Be Comfortable Not Knowing
Be Extraordinary, Accept Adversity
The Performance In Your Mind Is Nothing

Subscribe To The Great Acting Blog