There's No Way Around, Only Through (aka Run Toward The Pain)
What Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and a very mangled week taught me about facing hard things
There’s a deadline approaching that you have been covertly ignoring.
A tax return that hasn’t been lodged. An appointment that hasn’t been booked. A tough conversation you’ve been putting off for three weeks.
We all have our own version of this.
Tough shit that we just don’t want to do because it’s hard.
Just thinking about it hurts. The mere anticipation of the discomfort is enough to make you scroll past it, close the tab, find an escape and tell yourself you’ll deal with it tomorrow. But you don’t.
We don’t. I don’t.
Because tomorrow rolls around and guess what…
Tomorrow has its own version of that list! And that thing you avoided yesterday is still here—just bigger, louder, heavier and way harder to ignore.
Most people live like this their whole lives.
Running from discomfort on an endless loop. Avoiding discomfort by running to apparent safety, never realising that the running is the exhausting part.
The pain isn’t the problem.
Avoiding it is.
The Stoics knew wassup…
Marcus Aurelius didn’t have the luxury of avoidance. As emperor of Rome, every problem that landed on his desk was someone else’s worst day. Every item that made up his to-do list wasn’t just an action item; it dictated the fate of nations.
Should we go to war
How do we deal with famine
Do we execute this person or that one
When should we take over this part of the country
He didn’t have the luxury of avoiding any of it. The buck didn’t stop with him; he was the buck—and he journaled to himself about these learnings constantly in The Meditations.
You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.
That strength doesn’t come from the absence of hard things. It comes from the decision to stop treating hard things as things to be avoided.
It’s the daily choice to seek hard things as an opportunity for growth.
Ryan Holiday, in The Obstacle Is the Way, builds an entire philosophy around this. The obstacle in front of you is not in the way of your path—it is the path… i.e. what you’re running from is probably what you should be running toward (unless it’s Freddy Krueger or Voldemort).
Another super famous Stoic, Epictetus, who was born a slave and honestly had every reason to cry and whinge, said:
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
None of these guys is talking about resisting or avoiding.
Hard shit is going to happen. Take it as it happens, learn what you can, resolve the situation and keep it moving.
Run toward the pain.
Right now, my life is a bit mangled tbh.
I’m moving house. I’m applying for a new role at work. A close family member is in the final stages of their life. I’m managing a chronic neck injury that may require surgery. I’m trying to stay healthy, be a good partner and still show up here every single week.
Shit is hard and taxing, but that’s how it is.
No complaining, that is simply the list.
And every single item on it has its own version of pain attached to it. Uncertainty, anxiety, stresses and sadness. Even this moment of sitting down to write, when everything in me wants to lie down instead.
I want to avoid it. I want to do the easy stuff. I want to tell myself that I can take a break from writing, or that my health can wait til later, that I can take accountability when things settle down.
Life doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. Time don’t wait for no man!
So I run toward the pain.
Not because I have it figured out, or even think that I will figure it out. But because I know from experience that the only thing worse than doing the hard thing is carrying the weight of not having done it.
There’s no way around, only through.
The pain of the work is temporary. The pain of regret is eternal.
The longer you leave it, the worse it gets—that’s a promise.
Seneca wrote in Letters from a Stoic:
Everything else belongs to others. Time alone is ours.
The only thing we have is time, our time, our precious moments on this planet.
Every day that you avoid pain or work is a day that you offload a compounded version of that to your future self. The anxiety of avoiding it and the time pressure of now needing to complete it in less-than-ideal circumstances turns a hard thing into an impossible thing.
The trade doesn’t make sense—you pay the emotional cost without ever getting the relief.
It’s like holding onto a losing trade long past the point you knew it was done. Or staying in a relationship that ran its course two years ago. The longer you leave it, the more it costs you—and trust me, that bill will always need to be settled.
So stop putting it off. You know the work that needs to be done for you to be the healthiest, happiest version of yourself.
Don’t say no when every part of you knows the answer is yes.
When you see the pain, don’t turn away…
Grit your teeth. Tie your shoes up tight. Limber up.
Then run toward it, because it isn’t going anywhere, but you might be able to transmute it into something worth having.
That’s it from me this week, gang.
With gratitude,
SAV
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Every week I show up and tell the truth about the work—the hard bits, the slow bits and the bits that make it worth it.