Detachment from Outcomes
Care for your actions; release your attachment to specific outcomes, which are not entirely in your power.
The archer's analogy: the archer does everything possible — chooses a good bow, stands correctly, aims carefully, and releases smoothly. Then the arrow is in the hands of the wind. The Stoic, like the archer, gives full effort and then releases attachment to the result.
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
The archer analogy appears in Cicero's Stoic works and parallels the Bhagavad Gita's teaching on action without attachment to fruits.
Meditations
Written about in
- What Stoicism says about envy and comparison
The archer chooses the bow, stands correctly, aims and releases smoothly; the wind owns everything after that. Comparison measures where the arrows landed, which is exactly the portion the Stoics say was never yours.