I've been reading one of the Masters again today this morning um in this case senica and uh if I call someone a master it means I read them every day so I won't even bother recommending it to you um but certainly we are made up of who we hang out with all day whose influence we are under and and if you read Sena every day or many days of the week you certainly stand the benefit from it so that's why he's one of the Masters because he certainly is someone who whom you can't just read
once or twice it's someone you want to be with every day and today in uh [Music] letter 28 he is talking about those kinds of people that we all know and might be ourselves who constantly want to be somewhere else they want to in order to relax in order to take their mind off in in order to recharge their batteries they constantly dream of being this or that place and finally to be away from wherever they are now and be done with whatever they're doing right now especially concerning things that they have to be doing
for longer periods of time like an intense period at work or the holidays or Etc and we certainly know people like this and we often feel that way ourselves and senica talks about how we cannot outrun ourselves meaning most of the time if not all of the time when we are displeased with our current location or situation or people around us it's usually ourselves some part of ourselves that we're displeased with and we're trying to get away from it and think that an actual physical change of location of scenery might do the trick that this
is not the case will become obvious to you with a simple example that will a smaller uh instance that will demonstrate the larger problem here that I often run across in my own daily life and just observing other people is we all have those people that for whatever reason are in our lives um but that we don't necessarily want to be under the influence of like like I talked about before you you want to have influence on people and you want to have be influenced by people that you think somehow contribute to your character or
make you better at least you should and there are those people people that just don't do that and and we don't want to spend much time to them but with them but somehow maybe they're are relatives or in-laws or some friend that we've been friends with for a long time and that we're loyal to but really we're not we would not pick them as friends with the mind that we have now the character that we have now or the goal the goals that we're pursuing now so what happens is every time they ask us out
to go somewhere or just to spend time together we come up with excuses right we say I'm busy or I can't today this or that's going on I'm not in town etc etc and what do we expect really when we think about it we know that putting them off one time at a time is not going to solve the issue because we keep making excuses to avoid an inherently flawed relationship it's not really that we're too busy it's not really that we're can't meet because of this or that it's because we don't want to it's
not that we can't it's that we won't and don't want to and that's okay but we keep staggering the relationship in this way we keep putting it off and the problem just keeps getting worse and we actually become while it was perfectly fine not to want to be with a person or see a person at all we actually become Guilty by putting someone off because we make promises by saying oh it's only this time that I can we make a promise for the next time we keep coming up with single individual excuses for an inherently
flawed relationship because we're afraid of making Grand and total and final decisions but we owe it to ourselves to make those decisions if of course we feel that they're necessary and for that we first have to examine our our beliefs and and we need to make sure that that's what we really want that's what we really need that's a whole another issue but if we have come to that clear conclusion that this is just not the right person for us there's nothing wrong with not wanting to see with someone we can't be with everyone but
it is wrong to put someone off with excuses that don't really address the root cause and that are in effect dishonest and it's the exact same thing we do with ourselves it's it's crazy when we when we are inherently afraid of some big thing we keep running away we keep saying oh I just need a time off I just need to change a scenery I just just need to not be doing this for a while and of course sometimes that is the solution sometimes we just need to break from things but once again we often
do this with things that are inherently problematic that need a fundamental solution that we're just not giving it so if we have a problem with ourselves if we hate the work that we do you know if we um cannot handle handle stress any amount of it if we just can't we don't have the durability or the stamina to go through situations that are very normal that everyone has to go through then the problem lies with us and not with the situation and outrunning this or that occurrence of that fundamental problem is not a fix and
it only makes us more stressed more tired TI which fuels that whole process of wanting rest wanting a change of scenery and the whole idea of running away from everything whereas as senaka also says a mind that has that realizes it has a problem and and fixes a problem fundamentally at the root can handle not only the amount of stress it was experiencing before because of whatever lack in its character but much more than that and in fact while before we were sick and tired of perfectly ordinary and pleasant life situations we now become almost
immune to any life situation any stressful thing that might be going on because we've found peace within we are so happy with our character our personality the way we do things we're so in peace with everything because we're not being dishonest we're not putting things off we're not giving singular wrong excuses to avoid a fundamental General problem that we are so pleased and by the way by doing it that way of course we avoid a lot of stress and are just peaceful and and at at ease because of that but also because of the fact
that we know that we handle things the right way and the honest way and the proper way that hardly anything can stress us out anymore because what is a noisy room to someone who used to be stressed out who has come to love spending time with themselves and just doesn't need other people to entertain them or to be around interesting people all the time to feel happy and engaged with to situation you can always turn a worse situation into a better one by simply having that inner mindset of you know even if a situation is
too stressful than you'd normally like it might still be interesting I mean how people act this way what's going on what has people um what the reason is for people to to be this loud in this situation or or whatever is going on you can be a silent Observer you can find it interesting and soon enough the situation will end and and you'll be back to what you're doing anyway the point is that we should not let external circumstances constantly bring us out of this idea that now this very moment is fine there's nothing wrong
with it but if we keep not working on ourselves having these let's say weaknesses in our character where we can't handle stress we can't handle um annoying people we can't handle crowded places then we're constantly in a position of I don't want to be here and I don't want to be here now and we constantly look to the future or look to the past and we're just uncomfortable in the now but the now is all we have so that just creates a bad habit a bad circumstance of Life constantly wishing to be in the future
constantly wishing to be somewhere else than we are now but senica says a mind that is settled a character that is at peace with itself will always be home wherever it is both in location and in time so I thought I would I owe this to you uh what I what I read today what I what it made me think about today and I think it might help you as well just start attacking the inherent problems in your relationships the inherent problems in your relationship with yourself instead of constantly finding temporary I don't even want
to call them fixes but some something that makes you temporarily feel better and doesn't fix the grander problem in fact makes it worse give that some thought I think we all have both physical places and mental places in our character that needs this kind of work and that where we've been avoiding the general issue and once we work on it once we solve a big issue that's been inherent in our lives everything becomes so much easier it becomes easier to fix other such problems and at some point there it just isn't much left and you
feel this great Bliss and ease and just happiness that's what it is it's it's happiness
