Marcus Aurelius, Meditations V.20: "Our actions may be impeded by [others], but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

Ryan Holiday's bestselling The Obstacle Is the Way brought this passage to millions of readers, and rightly so—it's one of Marcus's most potent formulations. But popularization tends toward flattening, and this passage deserves more granularity than a single move called "reframing."

Marcus wrote his Meditations in Greek, not Latin, and his original phrasing is instructive: to empodon ergo synergei to ergo, kai to en te hodo hodopoiei—"what impedes the work cooperates with the work, and what is in the path makes the path." The verb synergei—root of our "synergy"—suggests the obstacle cooperates with the work rather than merely stepping aside. And hodopoiei ("way-making," from hodos, path) echoes the Greek understanding that the psyche doesn't just travel the road that fortune (tyche) lays down, but actively makes its own way from whatever material circumstance provides. The obstacle doesn't become the way in the sense of........

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