I kept a wish list in the notebook for most of one winter and never noticed what it was. Page after page read like orders I was placing with the universe. The reply should have come Tuesday. The flight should not have been delayed. The conversation with my sister should have gone the other way. None of the orders were filled. I wrote them again the next week, as though the universe had missed them the first time.
Epictetus gave me the word for the habit. He taught in Nicopolis, a former slave turned philosopher, and chapter 8 of his Enchiridion is twenty-three words: "Don't demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well." (That is the Elizabeth Carter translation. I counted because it felt too short for the size of it.)
It is worth reading him exactly, because this is easy to mistake for positive thinking. Positive thinking would tell me the delay was a gift, the silence was a blessing, the lost day was secretly fine. Epictetus is doing something colder and simpler. He is reversing the direction of the wanting. Stop demanding that the day match the wish. Take the day as it came and do the wanting there instead.
The version I use now is a two-column page. Left column: what I demanded of the day, in plain words. The reply should have come Tuesday. The flight should not have been delayed. Right column: the same facts, rewritten as something I can genuinely want. Not relabeled as good. Wanted. The silence held, and I got my Tuesday evening back. The delay meant the meeting went ahead without me and I watched it go fine without me. Three months of left-column pages cost me nothing but ink and gave me nothing but practice in disappointment. The right column is shorter and I use it now.
Here is the part I did not expect. The demand column was never about Tuesday or the flight. It was me trying to write the day's script before the day arrived, and the journal was where I stored the drafts the day refused. Chapter 8 does not ask me to stop writing. It asks me to write the wish after the fact, and to make it true.
In The Emperor's Journal I now draw the two columns under the date once a week. Left side, the demands I placed. Right side, the facts, wanted as they were. The pages are getting shorter.
Arrian took down the Enchiridion from Epictetus's lectures in Nicopolis, where he had been exiled after Domitian threw the philosophers out of Rome. Eight short chapters in, in twenty-three words. I still write the demand column first. The rewrite comes after.