Day 20 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Marcus Aurelius wrote a sentence in the Meditations that Ryan Holiday turned into a book title, and that has been quoted so many times it risks losing its sharpness.
So let’s go back to the original before we work with it.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
Read that again slowly.
Marcus wasn’t offering consolation, and he wasn’t saying “look on the bright side, your obstacle might secretly be an opportunity” (that’s a different, weaker claim).
His point was more radical: the obstacle is the way.
The difficulty doesn’t redirect you toward your purpose.
It is your purpose.
The context matters.
Marcus wrote this in the middle of active military campaigns, administrative crises, political corruption, and personal loss.
From inside genuine difficulty, not from a position of comfort dispensing advice about mild inconvenience.
He was writing about what difficulty actually is, and what someone who understands it correctly can do with it.
His argument: the universe presents you with resistance, and that resistance is the material of your development, not something arbitrary or malicious.
The virtues that matter, courage, justice, wisdom, temperance, develop only under conditions that require them.
Courage requires something genuinely frightening.
Justice requires situations where it would be easier to be unjust.
Wisdom requires problems without obvious answers.
Temperance requires genuine temptation.
Remove the obstacles and you remove the training ground.
The obstacle is not the interruption of the work.
The obstacle is the work.
The Stoics had a practice for this, an active form of amor fati: not just accepting obstacles, working with them actively.
When something difficult arrives, the first instinct is to ask “how do I remove this?”
The more useful question is “what does this require of me?”
You often can’t answer the first.
You can almost always answer the second.
For vegans, this reframe is particularly alive in two specific contexts.
The first is the experience of cultural resistance.
If you’ve been vegan for any length of time, you’ve encountered it:
the pushback,
the dismissal,
the social friction,
the conversations that go nowhere,
the sense of swimming against a very strong current.
The default response to this experience is frustration, understandable and often justified.
The Stoic reframe asks: what does this resistance require of you?
It requires patience.
It requires the ability to hold your position under pressure without becoming defensive or aggressive.
It requires clarity about why you believe what you believe, sharp enough to survive repeated challenge.
It requires creativity in finding ways to make the case that land with different people.
All of these are capacities.
All of them develop through exactly the kind of friction that makes vegan life difficult.
The obstacle, cultural resistance to veganism, is the training ground for the advocacy skills that actually move people.
The second context is more internal: the experience of your own inconsistency.
The gap between the person you’re trying to be and the person you are on a given day.
The Stoic teaching here is the same: that gap is the specific material you’re working with, not a failure to be ashamed of.
You can’t develop courage by being brave when it costs you nothing.
You can’t develop temperance by never facing temptation.
The gap between ideal and actual is the space where the work happens, not evidence the ideal is unachievable.
Marcus developed a practical exercise from this principle.
When an obstacle appears, the question shifts from “why did this happen to me?” to “what is this an opportunity to practise?”
Not a performance of positivity, a genuine reorientation.
The difficult conversation is an opportunity to practise courage and patience.
The failed plan is an opportunity to practise adaptability.
The hostile response is an opportunity to practise equanimity.
The obstacle doesn’t stop being an obstacle.
You don’t have to pretend it’s welcome.
You just relate to it differently: as material, not as interference.
That shift changes what’s available to you.
The person who experiences obstacles as interference spends their energy resisting them.
The person who experiences obstacles as material spends their energy working with them.
Same circumstances.
Completely different outcome.
“The cucumber which is bitter? Throw it away. Brambles in the path? Go round them. That’s all you need to know.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
Not every obstacle is a lesson.
Some things are just in the way.
The discernment is knowing which is which, and developing the capacity to work with the ones that are actually yours to work with.
Practice for today
Name a current obstacle in your life, something that feels like it’s blocking you.
Write: what does this specific difficulty require of me that I’d otherwise avoid developing?
Then write what one concrete step of working with it (rather than against it) would look like.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.