Massimo Pigliucci

But even they understood that that's only provisional on the fact that your mind works more or less normally.

At some point, it might not, right?

So they put me in an emergency room, which means it was somewhat crowded.

You know, there was no privacy on it.

But I did have my iPad and I did have a charger.

And the first thing I did was to open meditations and discourses and the letters of Seneca and remind myself of, you know, what is it that these people are telling me that is so important to me, that is so meaningful to me.

Right now, I'm going through a crisis where I clearly have very little control.

I don't, there's not much I can do here, right?

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.