The gate agent said it into the intercom in the flat, over-it tone of someone who’d already said it a few times that week, while my toddler used the empty seat next to ours as a runway for a very small, very loud toy plane, oblivious to the actual one going nowhere outside the window. Nobody at the gate got an explanation. Somewhere between Santiago and São Paulo, our flight had turned into a placeholder on a departures board instead of an actual departure.
We sat there for three hours. Not because we chose to. Nothing about it was up for negotiation. No supervisor to convince, no version of the afternoon where wanting to be home sooner got us home any sooner.
That afternoon at the gate is a small, low-stakes version of something the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes wrote roughly 2,300 years ago, in verses the Roman statesman Seneca liked enough to translate and pass along in a letter of his own: “The Fates lead the willing; they drag the unwilling.” Cleanthes wasn’t talking about a delayed flight out of Santiago. He meant something closer to the whole shape of a life, the parts of it nobody actually votes on.
I’ve had more of those than most people my age, just by the geography of it. Central Asia first, then Malaysia, then São Paulo, with a Chilean husband and his family thrown into the mix along the way. Some of those moves I chose outright. Others chose me, in the sense that a spouse’s opportunity or a family’s circumstances make the decision before you’ve fully weighed in. Cleanthes’ line would have saved me some resentment on the ones I didn’t pick, if I’d read it at twenty-two instead of well into my thirties.
The parts you don’t get a ballot on
A lot of the last two years of mine fall into that category. Nobody handed me a form asking whether I wanted a second pregnancy that came with real, humbling weight gain I couldn’t will away, or a newborn who arrived with her own schedule and no interest in mine, or a toddler who started daycare a little earlier than we’d planned because she needed other kids more than she needed one more year at home with us. None of it was a referendum. It just arrived, the way weather arrives.
What Cleanthes is pointing at isn’t passivity. Being dragged and being willing can produce the exact same outcome from the outside, the same flight home a day later, the same newborn in the same crib. The difference lives entirely on the inside, in whether you spend the ordeal resenting the thing that’s already decided, or actually leaning your weight into it. I’ve done both. Leaning in uses a lot less energy than the alternative, mostly because fighting a decision that’s already been made doesn’t change the decision. It just adds a second, smaller fight on top of the first one, the one against your own mood.
My husband and I actually chose a version of this on purpose a few years ago, which is different from the flight-delay story but runs on the same logic. In my twenties I was something like a hundred percent ambition and zero percent family. These days it runs closer to sixty percent family and forty percent ambition, and that wasn’t an accident. We looked at the season we were actually in, two small kids and both of us wanting careers that still mattered to us, and decided he’d push harder professionally right now while I shifted more of my own weight toward home, without either of us fully stepping back from our own work. Nobody dragged us into that math. We walked into it willingly, which is the entire difference Cleanthes is describing.
Discipline is the part of this that people usually skip. Willing alignment isn’t the same as passive drift, and I think that gets lost whenever this idea gets simplified into a poster. You still need an actual sense of where you’re headed, or “leaning in” just becomes an excuse to get swept along by whatever’s loudest that week. The whole point of choosing the family-first stretch of the last few years was that Matias and I had a clear picture of what we wanted our household to look like on the other side of it. Being willing, in Cleanthes’ sense, still runs on that same clear picture. It’s just a plan you’ve stopped fighting alongside.
The Vessel has made a video about a version of this same idea, minus the Roman poet. It opens with all the small coincidences people turn into cosmic signs, a bird landing on a window, an ex texting back out of nowhere, and spends most of its time on why the sign is never really the point. The point I kept landing on while making it lines up with what Cleanthes said first: what actually matures you is the honesty and the responsibility you bring to meeting a hard thing.
What willing actually costs
None of this means the demanding stretch feels light. It doesn’t. Two kids under two, a full workload, a new nanny still learning our household’s rhythm, and a level of rest I’ve openly accepted I won’t get back for a few years is genuinely tiring, and I don’t think Stoicism, ancient or modern, is asking anyone to pretend otherwise. The willing version of a hard season is still hard. It’s just hard in a straight line instead of hard with extra resistance stacked on top of it.
Some weeks the line between accepting a hard season and just enduring one gets blurry, and I don’t think anyone should white-knuckle their way through that distinction alone. If any of this is landing closer to heavy than interesting for you right now, talking to someone about it, a therapist, a friend who won’t just nod along, is worth more than any quote from a man who died before the Colosseum was built.
We landed a little after midnight instead of dinnertime. My toddler slept through the actual takeoff after performing every possible version of it herself at the gate for three hours straight. None of the delay cost us anything real. It just cost us the evening we’d planned, which turned out not to matter much once we stopped comparing it to the one that actually happened.
Somewhere over the Andes, on the flight that did eventually leave, I realized I hadn’t spent those three hours at the gate actually fighting anything. I’d stopped being in an argument with a delay that was never going to negotiate back. That’s the whole trick, as far as I can tell, and it’s a lot less mystical than a two-thousand-year-old quote makes it sound. You don’t get to pick most of what shows up. You get to pick whether you’re fighting it or moving with it, and only one of those options leaves you with any energy left over for the parts of life you actually did choose.
