Fortify Your Inner Citadel

It’s easy to feel like we’re one step away from everything being perfect. Lose weight and then we’ll be happy. Get a promotion and then we’ll be happy. Move to a new city and then we’ll get it together.

In this exercise of imagining ourselves in the future, we forget that we’re someone today. That our life is taking place right now. What’s going to be so different about us in the future? We have evidence of ourselves, in this moment, not being able to enjoy it. What’s going to change between now and then?

"The only Zen you will find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you," wrote Alan Watts. We’re not a location or a yoga retreat away from Zen. Or happiness. Or whatever it is we’re looking for.

The location you’re in, the clothes you’re wearing, the job you’re working – you’re still bringing the same you to them. No external change is going to change the quality of your inner life.

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts. We want to strive to be our best anywhere, in any situation. To be in control of our emotions.

This world is as bad or as great as you think it is. You get to decide. There’s no objective measurement. If you want to let the media or politicians – who have an incentive to make you feel like the world is always on the verge of ending – be your guide, you will never enjoy your short life.  

The stoics would refer to the concept of an inner citadel. A strong sense of self that nothing on the outside could get to.

“People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul,” Aurelius added in Meditations.

Fortifying our inner citadel is what we’re doing when we do hard things. When we workout. When we meditate. We’re practicing for life.

We’re practicing doing hard things so that when life inevitably gets hard, we can be calm, cool and collected on the inside. So that we’re aware of that split second between stimulus and response. We retreat to our inner citadel and make the best decision. We’re not pushed around by emotion.

Work to build a strong inner citadel so you can thrive in any situation. The quality of each day is largely based on what you’re bringing to it. Your mindset. How you’re choosing to interpret the events of the day.

“If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation,” said Epictetus. Getting worked up over the news, world events or something someone said to you is a choice.

The quality of your life and each day is based on you. You have to be what you’re looking for. That’s how you find it. It’s not something you’ll find out there, it’s something in there.