Massimo Pigliucci

I'm in an emergency room at the mercy of both whatever is happening to my body and, you know, whatever the doctors and the nurses decide.

There was the anxiety, of course, of not knowing what had happened and maybe a doctor might show up either the same day or a week later and tell me, you know what, you got a, I don't know, brain tumor or something like that, right?

That was certainly a life possibility.

But I decided to

Two things about it.

Number one, mostly cast that thought aside because, well, I don't know.

And until I know, there is nothing I can do about it.

And secondly, from time to time, I, again, pick up my tablet and open my journal.

And I started doing what...

The Stoics refer to it as a premeditatio malorum, which means it's Latin for thinking about bad stuff happening in the future.

The notion is to do it in the way in which Marcus was doing the meditations, analytically, detaching yourself, writing to yourself in the second person.

And so I wrote to myself in the second person, okay, so there is a chance that there is something wrong here, either with your heart or your brain.

So what are you going to do about it?

How are you going to deal with this situation, right?

If the situation, assuming that the situation is, you know, one of the worst case scenarios, are you ready to handle it?

And what are you going to do in terms of handling it, right?

Well, one of the first things you're going to do is to figure out as much as possible what in fact it is.

So listen to your doctors and what they're saying.

Then get a good, reasonable estimate of...

what might happen in the near future, how long that future might be, and then you redirect, you reorganize your life accordingly.