Discovering Yourself to Fix Yourself

📜 Quote of the Week 📜

How do you know what you’re doing is the right thing to do if you’ve never done wrong?

How do you know what you’re doing is the good thing to do if you’ve never done bad?

You don’t - and this is what Seneca is talking about when he says “you must discover yourself in the wrong before you can reform yourself.” If you’ve never done bad, and don’t realize you’ve done bad, you’ll never seek to correct yourself.

And in order to realize we’ve done bad (for things less obvious), we have to be harsh with ourselves. Because when we’re harsh with ourselves, we’ll see everything we need to know about what we’re doing: the good, the bad, the right, and the wrong.

But that’s not to say that we should purposefully do bad. There are things in life that we naturally know are bad without having to do them, but again, the things less obvious is mainly what Seneca is talking about - things that we look at and can’t immediately tell if it’s wrong or situations that we somehow find ourselves in.

As we live our lives, we’ll slowly see the faults in our actions of these things that are less obvious… slowly.

And when that happens, we have the ability to recognize them and correct it.

Cheers,

Adam