"Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things."

—Epictetus, Enchiridion

The ego tends to experience events and interpretations of events as the same thing. Something happens, and the story about what it means arrives so quickly that the two seem inseparable. The story—that we have failed, that we are unsafe, that things are not as they should be—can feel as solid as the event itself.

Epictetus was a former slave writing in the first century. He had few illusions about what circumstances could be changed and what could not. What he noticed was the small, persistent space between what happens and what we make of it. That space may be narrow, and finding it may take practice. But it may also be where something like freedom lives—not in changing what occurs, but in loosening the grip of the story we immediately build around it.