Zoe’s Choice 

Just before summer, my 16-year old daughter Zoe decided she wanted to change schools. She was an average student, in an average school, surrounded by teenagers not particularly motivated by schoolwork or giving their best. She wasn’t frustrated with the situation but had a wake-up call in the spring and decided she wanted to change for a better school, one she had asked for the previous year, but hadn’t got into. 

“My entire life will change” 

In the French public school system, you can’t just change schools if you want to. You need to have a very specific reason, and we hadn’t. Following the usual administrative process would probably fail to respond to her wishes. So she declared, “I’ll write to the headmaster.” She spent the next five days (hand)writing, reading out loud what she wrote, rewriting, using a mix of reasonable arguments and emotion (“My entire life will change if I can get into your school”). She took the letter directly to the school secretary and didn’t have to wait long for the headmaster’s response the next day, who offered to meet the following week. The meeting went well, and the headmaster said he would defend her case at the commission that was meeting in a few weeks. 

Achieving what’s under your control 

“Do you think it’s going to work?” Zoe kept on asking me, about five times a day. “It’s already worked,” I told her. “What was under your control, you achieved. Writing a great letter, giving your best self at the interview.” I didn’t mention Epictetus as such (she hates it when I do that) but I very strongly thought about this: 

You will never have to experience defeat if you avoid contests whose outcome is outside of your control. 

Epictetus, Enchiridion, Ch19 

Of course, we all tend to focus on the result of our actions. That is how we measure success. If we aim for something, we hope to attain it. But focusing on the intention, on the preparation, thinking out-of-the-box about what you could do to reach your goals, is really where we should focus our energy and time. It seems to me that most of the time, if we don't get what we aim for, it is because we misplace our responsibility. Many of Zoe’s friends also wanted to change schools, but they just went through the usual process, not realizing there was much more under their control, or in their power, than they thought. 

But beyond changing schools, there was another outcome in what she initiated: proving to herself that if she put the right energy and intention into what she sincerely wanted, she could change the course of things and get someone to help her reach her goals. Developing a clear view of what is in our power extends our freedom and our range of action. 

This story could have ended either way. I guess a refusal from the commission would have given Zoe (and me) the opportunity to work on detaching from outcomes. But the commission accepted, so I guess we can keep that for our next level of Stoic practice. 

---

Flora Bernard co-founded the Paris-based philosophy agency, Thae, in 2013. Flora now works to help organisations give meaning to what they do.

 

 

---