Zeno of Citium, who founded Stoic philosophy, lost his entire cargo of purple dye in a shipwreck before he ever wrote a word of philosophy. The catastrophe, by most accounts, was what turned him toward ideas. The Stoics who came after him developed a practice they called *melete* — deliberate mental rehearsal of setbacks before they happen — not to manufacture anxiety, but to drain events of their power to surprise you into bad decisions. What makes this genuinely useful for anyone managing a project or raising a child is the direction the rehearsal runs: you're not imagining failure so you can prevent it, you're imagining failure so that when Tuesday's crisis arrives, you already have a self that has been there before. The surprise is gone. What remains is judgment.

Name the specific failure — in a project or at home — that you have been most carefully not imagining. Why that one?

Drawing from Stoicism — Zeno of Citium