Coherence In Life

In our lifetime we are constantly living experiences that others have lived that are new to us. In order for us to avoid losing coherence in our lives we must necessarily think the same way of others situations as of our own. Epictetus talks about this in his handbook: "Someone else's child is dead, or his wife. There is no one would not say, "It's the lot of a human being." But when one's own dies immediately I is, "Alas! Poor me!""(Section 26). Here, he said through several examples that people must act the same way when an event occurs to them as when the same event occurs to a different person. The example that most interested me was when he explained the case about close family deaths. When it is another person we can be indifferent yet when someone close to us perishes we are consumed by a state of self pity. This coherence in thought is something very challenging to maintain but it is possible. We can't think of others as if they weren't human but rather we need to think of how hard it must be to suffer through such an unfortunate event. Even if we are only able to imagine the horror of the situation the effort is what makes the difference.

That ability to see through other's eyes requires training and effort to do. Many times what we see is too horrible to accept and because of this we deny it. This is the reason why we try to take an objective and cold point of view of other suffering. If we don't see their suffering then we won't suffer ourselves. Even if this can spare us some pain we will not be prepared for a similar event. In order for us to be at peace with ourselves we must go through the pain of others and if such an thing were to happen to us we will already know what lies in our path.