The Stoic at the Bus Stop

A man stood at a bus stop one morning, waiting for the 8:14, which was now the 8:21, which was now showing on the app as "delayed". He had a meeting at nine. He could feel the meeting starting without him in his chest, even though it was still forty minutes away.

He checked the app. He checked it again. He muttered something. He checked the app a third time.

Beside him, an older man waited too. The older man was not checking anything. He was looking at a small bird that had landed on the railing.

After some minutes, the younger man asked, almost to himself: "Why isn't this damn bus coming?"

The older man, still watching the bird, said: "Because it isn't here yet. It will be here when it is here."

The younger man laughed, sharply, the way you laugh when something is true and you do not want it to be.

"You don't seem worried," he said.

"What would the worry change?" said the older man.

What the story is for

The older man was not a saint. He was simply practicing something Epictetus described two thousand years ago. The Stoics had a phrase for it: the dichotomy of control. There are things up to you, and things not up to you. The bus is not up to you. Your reaction to the bus is.

This is not the same as not caring. The older man also wanted the bus to come. He had places to be. The difference was where he had put his attention. He was not spending the wait on something he could not change. He was spending it on the bird.

Most of our suffering is the attempt to control what is not up to us — the traffic, the weather, the unread email, the opinion someone is forming about us in another room. We pour ourselves into these and find, at the end of the day, that we are exhausted and the world has moved at its own pace anyway.

A small practice

Next time you are stuck — in traffic, in a queue, in a delay — try this: put down whatever you are checking. Find a bird, a cloud, a tree, the patterned tile under your shoe. Attend to it for thirty seconds.

You will not become a Stoic in thirty seconds. But you will discover something almost embarrassingly simple: the wait was not the problem. The wait was, in fact, an unexpected gift, which you had been too busy refusing to receive.

The bus, eventually, came. The older man stepped on first. The younger man stepped on after, surprised to find that he was not, after all, late.

Most days, this is the choice.