EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR
This is a pro-bear Substack
I once read about a family who fell in love and bought a dog while on vacation. They returned to their home in Yunnan province, China, and raised their beloved pet for two years. The pup grew at a ferocious rate, devouring a box of fruit and two buckets of noodles every day. He attained a tremendous size and started to look like a different animal entirely. When he began walking on his hind legs, the startled family finally realized that they had been raising, not a 250 pound Tibetan Mastiff as they had believed, but a rare Asiatic black bear, which they were now very eager to get rid of. “I am a little scared of bears,” the mother remarked.
I was struck by the fact that she wasn’t afraid of this enormous ravening beast when she thought it was a dog. It lived in their home and she thought of it as an affectionate, snuggly companion. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, “All is as thinking makes it so.” She only became scared when she realized it was a bear in dog’s clothing.
The Catholic faith has a patron saint for nearly everything, and the patron of bears is St. Corbinian. He was a hermit who was determined to make a pilgrimage to Rome. On the journey, he was ambushed by a bear, which ate his pack horse. With a Stoic sang-froid, he made the bear carry his luggage to the Holy City. As Marcus Aurelius put it, “The impediment to action advances action.” Upon arrival, he freed the bear, which returned to the wild. I’m not sure this is a story that would gladden the hearts of Catholic bears, but the ways of the church are mysterious.
Marcus Aurelius may have seen bears at gladiatorial games, but sadly, there is no evidence that he had a pet bear or indeed ever encountered a bear up close. Still, he did leave us this trenchant thought: “Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.”
This post is adapted from the book “Wise Up.” To order: