“Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.”
— Seneca the Younger, De Ira
Dear journal,
We arrived in El Paso under cover of darkness—1 a.m., to be precise. The kind of hour reserved for confessions and mistakes. Our delay? Three hours. The cause? A missing captain. Not lost in the sense of “on his way,” but rather: not scheduled at all. It turns out planes require pilots, and this one simply… hadn’t been assigned one.
It was a surreal kind of stillness—an aircraft fully boarded, fueled, and parked at the gate, waiting for a man who did not know he was needed.
To compound our descent into absurdity, the air conditioning had surrendered. The plane became a convection oven filled with mildly seasoned humans. My seat—middle, of course—was flanked by two strangers whose bodies, like mine, had entered a slow and irreversible state of melt. I no longer sat so much as adhered.
In that cramped stasis, I could not read, could not write, could barely move without violating the boundaries of my neighbors’ increasingly damp misery. But I could listen. And so I reached for the only lifeline I had packed that wasn’t physical: the audiobook version of How to Keep Your Cool, a modern rendering of Seneca’s De Ira, his classic essay on the futility and danger of anger.
There was something delightfully perverse about listening to Stoic philosophy while slowly poaching between two equally miserable strangers. Seneca, ever the Roman pragmatist, said: “He who gives way to violent gestures will increase his frenzy.” And I thought of the man behind me who had started muttering threats to the overhead bin.
Seneca’s advice is deceptively simple: expect to be wronged. Practice imagining insult. The wise man prepares his mind for frustration the way a soldier drills for war. I had not prepared. I had brought snacks, a charger, and mild optimism. I was wholly unready for heat and human proximity to become indistinguishable.
But something shifted as I listened. Maybe it was the monotone narrator. Maybe it was the resignation that sets in once you’ve passed through every stage of irritation and out the other side into absurdity. Or maybe it was Seneca himself, whispering across millennia: “You must consider not what has happened, but what you would have done differently had you foreseen it.”
Would I have packed a different attitude? Probably. A fan? Definitely.
Eventually, the pilot did appear—calm, casual, untouched by our collective unraveling. We landed in El Paso just after midnight. By the time we gathered our things and stumbled into the ghost-lit baggage claim, it was 1:00 a.m.
And somehow, I wasn’t angry anymore. Not enlightened, mind you—but softened. I had endured. Not with grace. Not even with patience. But with attention.
That, I think, is what Seneca asks of us. Not sainthood, but consciousness. Not to float above frustration, but to feel it and not let it drive the wheel.
El Paso greeted us with heat and silence. And I walked into it, grateful for movement, for air, for the chance to become unstuck—from my seat, from my own irritation, from the idea that things ought to go as planned.
Always,
Dave