It’s been a strange year, hasn’t it? Our days have been disrupted. Our lifestyles changed. Plans have been put on pause. Whole projects made impossible. 

In one sense, this pandemic has been totally unprecedented. But in another sense, isn’t it all too common? We find ourselves laid up with a broken leg. We have to spend two months away from home, cleaning up a mess in the West Coast office. We get posted overseas with little notice. We get laid off. We get exiled, as Seneca did, or we find ourselves locked up, as Stockdale did. 

Stuff happens and we find ourselves in some strange or unexpected situation. The question, as always according to the Stoics, is what will we make of this time? What will we manage to accomplish within the constraints and the reality of where we find ourselves? 

Here is biographer (and Daily Stoic podcast guest) Andrew Roberts’ summary of the time Napoleon spent in exile after his abdication: 

During his nearly ten months on Elba he reorganized his new kingdom’s defences, gave money to the poorest of its 11,400 inhabitants, installed a fountain on the roadside outside Poggio (which still produces, cold, clean drinking water today), read voraciously (leaving a library of 1100 volumes…), played with his pet monkey Jenar, walking the coastline along the goat-paths while humming Italian arias, grew avenues of mulberry trees, reformed customs and excise, repaired the barracks, built a hospital, planted vineyards, paved parts of Portoferraio for the first time and irrigated land. He also organized regular rubbish collections, passed a law prohibiting children from sleeping more than five to a bed, set up a court of appeals and an inspectorate to widen roads and build bridges. While it was undeniably Lilliputian compared to his former territories, he wanted Elba to be the best-run royaume d’operette in Europe.

Not bad. 

It was his fault he had been exiled, and he was a flawed man in many ways, but still, it’s impressive how Napoleon chose alive time. Those ten months were as productive as some people’s entire lives. He chose to make the most of them. He chose to show up for them. He chose to do good where he could. 

No one knows what the next few months will hold, no one knows what strange, undesirable situation you may find yourself a decade from now. What counts, what you control, is what you manage to accomplish within it. What counts is how you respond, what counts is that you show up and live it. 

P.S. This was originally sent on January 4, 2021. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.