BEFORE THE CRISIS ARRIVES

Building the interior practice while conditions still allow it

I have entered the years Daniel Levinson called the late adult transition, the crossing between 60 and 65 in which the structure built across middle adulthood comes up for reappraisal before the final season begins. It is a vantage point, and from it I can see that I have lived inside 2 distinct conditions in adult life. The first is the condition of accumulated stability, the years in which the work was demanding but ordinary, the family was intact, the parents were well, and the structures by which I organised my identity were not yet being tested. The second is the condition of sustained crisis across multiple axes simultaneously, the years in which most of what I had assumed to be stable revealed itself to have been provisional. The readers of the earlier articles in this series will know what I mean by the second condition without my needing to narrate it again.

What I want to name in this article is not the crisis itself. It is what I learned about the interval that preceded it, about the work I either did or did not do during that interval, and about the difference that work made when the conditions changed.

The interior practice cannot be built under duress. It must be built in the years before the bill comes due. The people who navigate sustained adversity with any measure of dignity are not the ones who started the practice the day the crisis arrived. They are the ones who had been doing it, quietly and unremarkably, for years before they knew they would need it.

This is the article I would have liked to read in 2003. It is, in a sense, the article I am writing to my younger self, and to anyone whose conditions are still calm enough that the question feels theoretical.

The illusion of available time

In the years of stable conditions, the conviction is almost universal that there will be time to develop the interior life later. The 40s feel premature. The early 50s are too busy. The years of the major build, the major succession, the major exit, are reserved for the work that is visibly producing. The interior practice is filed under what will be attended to once the present demands lift.

The present demands do not lift. They are replaced by other present demands. The conditions of a serious adult life are continuous demand, and the assumption that there will arrive a clearing in which the interior work can finally be undertaken is among the most reliable forms of self-deception that accomplished people indulge.

The deeper error sits beneath the calendar one. We build retirement accounts in advance. We do not assume the wealth will materialise on the day we need to draw on it. We diversify investments, hold reserves against unforeseen liabilities, fund insurance against catastrophes we hope will not occur. The financial architecture of a prudent life is constructed entirely on the principle that the capacity to meet adversity must be assembled before adversity arrives.

The interior architecture is, with rare exceptions, assumed to operate on different rules. We expect to acquire equanimity, perspective, and the capacity to remain oriented under pressure on demand, at the moment we discover we need them. The expectation does not survive contact with the conditions it was supposed to address.

The moment a person discovers they need the practice is generally the moment they no longer have the spare capacity to build it. Crisis consumes the available reserves of attention and energy. The work of constructing an interior discipline requires precisely the surplus that crisis removes. The person in the middle of a business rescue, a divorce, a serious illness, the loss of a parent, the rupture of a primary relationship, does not have the bandwidth to begin a journalling practice, to learn to read Marcus Aurelius with the slowness he requires, to develop the habit of reflective attention that the practice rests on. They can only draw on what is already there.

If nothing is already there, they draw on nothing.

What Marcus was already doing

It is worth pausing on Marcus Aurelius, because his case is exemplary and frequently misread.

The Meditations are often discussed as if they were written from a position of crisis, as if the emperor took up his pen because his life had become unmanageable and the practice emerged in response to acute distress. The truth is more instructive. The notebooks we possess were written largely within the crisis years themselves, in camp on the Danube frontier, with the plague and the German wars already underway. What predated the crisis was not the journal but the discipline the journal records. Marcus had been trained in the practice from youth, and Rusticus had placed Epictetus in his hands decades before the pen touched those pages. The Antonine Plague, the betrayal of Avidius Cassius, the deaths of his children, the eventual approach of his own death, all of these arrived in a life whose interior discipline had been established for years. The writing under duress was possible only because the practice behind it had been built in calmer conditions, when there was no acute pressure to build it.

What Marcus was doing in the Meditations, every morning, before the day’s demands accumulated, was the unremarkable work of training his attention. He examined what was within his control and what was not. He reminded himself of mortality, of impermanence, of the smallness of his reputation in the context of the long arc of time. He rehearsed the principles by which he intended to meet the day. None of this was dramatic. None of this would have looked, on any single morning, like the work that would later make a difference.

The cumulative effect was the difference between an emperor who held his composure across 2 decades of crisis and an emperor who did not. The Roman world produced both. The one whose discipline had been built in advance was the one whose name we still read.

The Stoic tradition has a specific term for the practice Marcus was conducting. The Stoics called it premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils. The phrase is unattractive in English, but the discipline it names is the deliberate rehearsal, in calm conditions, of the difficulties that have not yet arrived. The point is not pessimism. The point is that imagining the loss of what one currently has, while one still has it, both deepens appreciation of the present and prepares the interior architecture for the day the loss becomes real. The person who has rehearsed the loss is not undone by it. The person who has refused to consider it is.

This is among the most countercultural disciplines available to a person whose conditions are presently good. The cultural injunction is to focus on what is going well, to maintain optimism, to avoid the morbid territory of imagined adversity. The Stoic discipline is the opposite. It insists that the imagined rehearsal of loss, conducted with restraint and without melodrama, is the means by which the inner citadel is built.

What Frankl had already built

Viktor Frankl’s case is the more extreme version of the same principle.

The popular reading of Man’s Search for Meaning treats it as an account of meaning discovered within Auschwitz. This is partially true. What it misses is that the framework Frankl was able to apply within the camp had been developed in his consulting rooms in Vienna in the 1930s, when he was a young psychiatrist working with patients who were not yet facing the conditions that would shortly arrive. The architecture of logotherapy, the three avenues of meaning, the conviction that the human capacity to choose a stance towards suffering was the last and ultimate freedom, were already in formation when the trains began running.

This is the part of the testimony that is most easily missed. Frankl did not invent his framework inside Auschwitz. He carried it into Auschwitz. The conviction he carried is the sentence the world now quotes: that everything can be taken from a man except “the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s own way”. What the camps tested was the architecture he had already built. Frankl never claimed that the framework saved his life. Survival, he insisted, was mostly a matter of chance, and the best did not return. What the architecture preserved was the inner freedom the conditions were designed to remove. The survival made the later writing possible. The later writing made the framework available to the millions of readers who have since drawn on it.

The lesson is uncomfortable in its directness. The interior practice that we either have or do not have is, in extremity, the only resource that remains. Everything external can be removed. The discipline of attention, the framework for meaning, the rehearsed capacity to choose a stance towards what cannot be changed, these are the only assets that survive the conditions in which everything else is taken.

They must be assembled before they are needed. They cannot be acquired in the moment of need.

The content of the practice

It is reasonable to ask, at this point, what the practice consists of. The general injunction to build interior architecture is of limited use without specific content.

What follows is not a programme. It is the unremarkable set of disciplines that, in my own experience, have constituted the practice in question. Other practitioners will name them differently. The substance, across the contemplative traditions, is broadly consistent.

The first discipline is the morning journal. The practice is older than the modern self-help genre by approximately 2,000 years, and it is older still than the Stoic tradition that gave it its most precise articulation. The discipline is the daily, written examination of what is within one’s control and what is not, conducted in the first 30 minutes of the day, before the demands of the day have begun to accumulate. The journal is not a record of what is happening. It is a workshop in which what is happening is examined. What is built in it, across hundreds and then thousands of mornings, is the habit of distinguishing, almost automatically, between the territory where action is appropriate and the territory where surrender is required. The capacity does not appear on demand. It is the accumulated residue of the practice that produced it.

The second discipline is the evening reflection. This is the Franklian half of the daily practice. It is the deliberate identification, before sleep, of where a creative, experiential, or attitudinal value was realised in the day that has passed. The reflection is honest. Some days, no meaning is identifiable, and the practice records that too. The cumulative effect is the gradual training of the attention to notice where meaning is in fact being made, even in days that on their surface offer nothing remarkable. The capacity to find meaning in a hard year depends on the trained eye that was developed in the years when finding it was easier.

The third discipline is the slow reading of the right books. The contemporary information environment trains the opposite habit. The reflexive consumption of new material, the unread accumulation, the confusion of breadth with depth, are the dominant patterns. The discipline of returning, repeatedly, to the same handful of texts, with annotation, with time for them to settle, with the willingness to read the same passage many times until it begins to address a different layer of one’s experience, is among the most countercultural commitments a thinking person can make. The shortlist need not be large. Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Frankl, and the philosophical psychologists who reward a slower reading. The point is not the accumulation of books read. The point is the relationship developed with the few texts that will, when the conditions deteriorate, become the only books that matter.

The fourth discipline is the stewardship of the body. A later article in this series returns to it at greater length, and the substance need not be anticipated here. What requires repeating is the connection. The body is the vessel through which every other discipline is conducted. Allowed to deteriorate, it forecloses the work. Tended well, it underwrites the work for as long as the work can be done. The stewardship of the body is not an alternative to the interior practice. It is its precondition.

The fifth discipline is the deliberate construction of silence in the structure of the week. The interior life cannot be built in an environment of continuous noise, continuous stimulation, continuous social and professional demand. There must be intervals in which nothing is being consumed, and nothing is being produced. The walk without the phone. The hour at the desk in the morning before the world begins. The day in which no meeting has been scheduled. The retreat, periodic and brief, in which the ordinary patterns are deliberately suspended. The contemplative traditions are unanimous on this point. The interior life requires the deliberate construction of the conditions in which it can be heard, and those conditions do not occur naturally in a successful modern life. They must be designed in.

None of these disciplines is dramatic. None would impress an observer on any single day. The cumulative effect, across years, is the only reliable source of the resilience that crisis will eventually demand. And there is a further way of naming that effect. What the disciplines cumulatively build is an identity, a purpose and a daily structure that do not depend on the structures currently carrying the life. The person who has somewhere interior to stand can release whatever circumstance removes. The person who does not, holds on.

If the structures by which you currently organise your identity were removed in the next 12 months, what interior practice would you still have to draw on?

The resistance of the well-functioning life

The resistance to starting the practice is greatest in the conditions when it can most easily be started. This is the central paradox, and it deserves direct naming.

The person whose business is performing, whose marriage is intact, whose health is good, whose parents are well, whose children are stable, has the surplus capacity required to build the practice and no felt pressure to do so. The interior architecture appears to be an optional refinement, a discipline appropriate to those with a particular taste for contemplation, not a necessary asset for the life they are currently inside.

The person whose conditions have deteriorated, whose business is failing, whose marriage is dissolving, whose health is in question, whose parents are dying, whose children are struggling, has every felt pressure to build the practice and no surplus capacity to do so. They are surviving. The reflective discipline is precisely what they cannot reach.

The window in which the work can be done is the window in which the work feels least necessary. By the time it feels necessary, the window has closed.

There is a further form of resistance that is harder to name. It is the resistance of the well-functioning life to the recognition that anything is missing. A person whose external conditions are good is rarely seeking the kind of work the interior practice describes. They are not in distress. They are not looking for a solution. The suggestion that an interior practice is necessary implies a deficit they cannot locate.

The recognition that will eventually arrive, if the life continues long enough, is that the well-functioning surface was always provisional.

The conditions that produced it were not durable. The identity it supported was load-bearing for circumstances that have now changed. The interior practice, had it been in place, would have continued to function regardless. In its absence, what now has to be assembled is precisely what could not be assembled under the conditions that now prevail. I have watched this from close range. When the structures that organised a life are removed late, with nothing built behind them, the vacuum does not fill.

This is not a counsel of pessimism. It is a counsel of accurate expectation. The conditions of a serious adult life will, at some point, change. The change may come through a crisis of business, of health, of family, of meaning. The form is unpredictable. The arrival is not. The honest question is not whether the conditions will require an interior practice. The honest question is what practice will be in place when they do.

What is built now is what will be available then. What is deferred now is what will be unavailable then. The arithmetic is not complicated.

The practice that continues

I am writing this in the early hours of a winter morning, in the conditions of present stability that have, after long absence, been restored to my life. The 17 years of journals sit on the shelf to my left. The 11th volume was completed earlier this year. The 12th has been started.

The practice was not built when I needed it most. It was built before I knew I would need it, then deepened under conditions of need, then sustained in the years since the need has eased. The unremarkable continuity is the substance of what has remained. Everything else, across these decades, has been provisional. The practice has been the only thing that did not depend on the conditions outside it.

The first article in this series asked what you were looking for in the domains where you have invested your adult life. The second proposed that meaning is available now, inside the conditions you are currently in, not deferred to a clean beginning that the conditions are unlikely to provide. This article makes the third part of the case. Building the practice that will sustain the meaning-making, and the meaning itself, must begin before the conditions require it. The window is now. It will not be later.

What practice will you have, in 10 years, that you have not started today?