June 07, 2026

Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny, wherever you have appointed me to go.

Cleanthes was a former boxer who studied under Zeno of Citium and eventually led the Stoic school in Athens around 260 BCE. He worked as a water-carrier at night to pay for his education, which means he built his entire philosophy while exhausted, poor, and at the mercy of circumstances he could not control. This line is not a resignation — it is a daily practice of accepting that the path is already being laid out, whether we cooperate or fight it. It speaks to impermanence because it names something most of us resist: the fact that our preferences about how things go are largely irrelevant to how things actually go.