What a Greek Philosopher Told Me To Tell You About Worrying
by Kalika Yap
I handed a client a blank page last spring and asked her to write down everything she was worried about.
She filled it in about four minutes. Nineteen things.
Then I asked her to circle only the ones she could put a hand on that day.
She circled three.
She’d been carrying all nineteen since Tuesday. And it was Friday.
I watched something go out of her shoulders when she saw the page. Not relief, quite. More like being told she was allowed to set something down.
That’s not a focus problem, and it isn’t a discipline problem either.
It’s a sorting problem.
And it has a remedy that’s been waiting for us for two thousand years.
The Line Everything Rests On
His name was Epictetus, and he was born around 55 AD in Hierapolis, a Greek-speaking town in what’s now Turkey.
He spent his youth in Rome as the property of another man. He was freed sometime after Nero died, and he went on to become one of the most quoted philosophers who ever lived.
Marcus Aurelius studied him closely. In Book 1 of Meditations, Marcus takes a moment to thank the man who handed him his own copy.
Epictetus opened his handbook, the Enchiridion, with a single sentence:
“Some things are in our power, and others are not.”
He put it first because he believed everything else rested on it.
And sit for a moment with who was saying it. Here was a man with no say over where he lived, what he did, or whether he was free.
If anyone had cause to be swallowed by what was being done to him, it was him.
He built his whole life on the other choice.
What This Looks Like On an Ordinary Tuesday
A potential client goes silent. A vendor doesn’t deliver.
And your own proposal has been sitting unfinished in drafts since last week.
You carry all three at the same weight, all day, into the evening, into the night.
But only one of them is actually yours. The proposal. That’s the one with a door in it you could walk through this afternoon.
Whether the client writes back, whether the vendor comes through. That’s weather.
And carrying weather is a particular kind of tired, because there’s no finishing it.
There’s no afternoon where you make someone answer their email and get to feel done.
So the effort goes out and nothing comes back, and by Thursday you’re worn through without having moved a single thing.
His student Marcus Aurelius, who happened to be a Roman emperor, put it plainly in Book 4 of Meditations:
“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed.’ Take away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed,’ and the harm is taken away.”
He isn’t telling us nothing bad happens. He ran an empire through a plague.
He’s saying the second layer, the story we lay on top of the thing, belongs to us.
And what belongs to us can be set down.
For the Nights When Sorting Isn’t Enough
The two columns will hold most days. Some nights they won’t, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.
For those, there’s a second practice, and Marcus returned to it again and again.
Book 9:
“Look down from above on the countless herds of men and their countless solemnities, and the infinitely varied voyagings in storms and calms.”
In Book 4 he does it again, reminding himself that the whole earth is a point, and his own home a small corner of it.
Modern readers call this the view from above. It’s a widening.
Not to decide your worry doesn’t matter. Only to let it return to its own size.
A hard conversation grows enormous at eleven at night because it’s the only thing in the frame.
Widen the frame and it becomes what it always was. One difficult hour, inside a long and mostly good working life.
Your Step-by-Step Guide: The Two Column Sort
Step 1: Let It All Out
A blank page and ten minutes. Everything you’re carrying about the business.
Don’t organize it. Don’t rank it. Don’t quietly leave out the ones that feel silly.
The silly ones are so often the ones taking your sleep.
Step 2: Draw the Line
A fresh page, a line down the middle.
Left: Mine. Things I could act on this week.
Right: Not Mine. Everything else.
Move each one across. Slowly. No hurry.
Step 3: Be Patient With the Ones That Won’t Sit Still
Most of them will feel like they belong on both sides. That’s not you being indecisive. Most worries genuinely have two halves.
“Will this client renew” goes right. Their budget and their board were never yours.
“Have I given them a reason to” goes left. That part is entirely yours.
“Will the market recover” goes right. “What am I making that serves people in this market” goes left.
Nearly every worry has a piece of itself on the left. Find that piece. It’s the only part that’s ever been yours to hold.
Step 4: Cross Out the Right
All the way through. A real line.
Not because those things don’t matter. Some of them matter enormously, and some of them may be breaking your heart.
Only because worry has never once been a form of preparation, and nothing on that side moves for all the weight we give it.
If something over there ever becomes yours to act on, it will come to you. You can let it.
Step 5: Do One Left-Hand Thing Today
Not the list. One.
Send the proposal. Make the call. Write down the number you’ve been avoiding. Ask the question.
The sorting is what gives you the quiet. Doing one thing is what gives you yourself back.
Step 6: When It’s Late and Loud, Widen
Close your eyes. Find yourself where you’re sitting.
Draw the view back slowly. Your room, your street, your city, the coastline, the whole turning planet with eight billion people on it, most of them awake somewhere tonight worrying about something too.
Stay there a minute. Then come back.
The thing will still be waiting. It’ll just be the size it actually is.
If You’d Like Company With This
Sometimes the two columns are obvious the moment they’re on paper. Sometimes it takes another person, sitting beside you, to see which side a thing really belongs on.
That’s a good deal of what I do with the women I coach.
No pitch. Just a real conversation about what you’ve been carrying.
DOWNLOADABLE WORKSHEET
The Control Audit
This worksheet will help you separate the worries you can act on from the ones you can’t. Using a simple step-by-step process inspired by Epictetus, you’ll sort what’s yours to carry, let go of what isn’t, and finish with one clear action you can take today.
