August 28, 2026

Send Your Mind Ahead

Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.

Seneca wrote this letter to his friend Lucilius shortly after news reached Rome that the prosperous city of Lyons had burned to the ground in a single night, a disaster no one had thought possible. He uses that shock to make a larger point about how the mind should be trained. Nothing should catch us unprepared, he argues, because we should send our thinking out ahead of us and consider not only what usually happens but everything that could happen. This is the practice later called premeditatio malorum, rehearsing delay, insult, and loss in advance so they arrive as expected guests rather than ambushes. For the Stoics this was not gloom but readiness, a way of pulling the sting out of misfortune before it ever strikes.

A principle of Stoicism: Premeditatio Malorum →