Tie Your Camel: Can You Let Go of What Is Not in Your Hands?

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You are waiting outside the operating room. There is nothing left for you to do, yet your mind will not stop, not even for a second. Two thousand years ago Epictetus, a slave in chains, and a thousand years ago al-Ghazali, who walked away from his lectern in Baghdad, searched for the answer to the same question: why do you still burn over something that is not in your hands?

Near present-day Denizli, just above the white travertine terraces of Pamukkale, lies an ancient city: Hierapolis. Around the middle of the first century AD, a child was born there into slavery. We do not know his real name. The name history remembers him by is Epictetus, which in Greek means "acquired," or quite simply, "bought." In other words, less a name than a record of ownership.

As a young man, Epictetus was taken to Rome. His master, Epaphroditus, was a powerful man who had risen in the service of the Emperor Nero, and who had once been a slave himself. Epictetus walked with a limp. There are two accounts of why. One says he was lame from birth, or from illness. The other, more famous one, is passed down centuries later by the Christian thinker Origen. According to this story, his master one day clamped Epictetus's leg into an instrument of torture and began to twist it. Epictetus said, in a calm voice, "You will break it." And when the leg broke, he added, with the same calm: "I told you that you would break it." Is the story true? We cannot know. But the very fact that such a story was attached to Epictetus tells us what kind of man he was remembered as.

Even while enslaved, Epictetus was permitted to study philosophy. He attended the lectures of the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus. He later won his freedom and began teaching in Rome. When the Emperor Domitian banished the philosophers from Rome, he went to Nicopolis, on the western coast of Greece, and opened a school there. He never wrote a book. His student Arrian, the same man who would later write the history of Alexander the Great, took notes on his teacher's lectures. Two works came out of those notes: the Discourses, which contain the longer talks, and a small booklet that distills their essence. Its Greek name is the Enchiridion, meaning the Handbook. And that is where the name comes from: a book to be carried in the hand, to be opened the moment you need it.

The Handbook opens with one of the starkest first lines in the history of philosophy. According to Epictetus, some things are up to us, and some are not. What is up to us are our judgments, our impulses, our desires and our aversions; in short, everything that is our own inner business. What is not up to us are our bodies, our possessions, our reputations, our positions; in short, everything that is not our own business.

When we first hear it, this distinction sounds almost too cool-headed to come from a slave. But when we look at Epictetus's life, we understand why he began with these words. His body was someone else's property. Someone else decided where he would go. Even his leg, if the story is true, was at the mercy of another man's whim. Only one realm remained that no one could touch: how he looked at what happened, and what he chose to do. Epictetus built his entire philosophy on that narrow ground, and he argued that it was not really narrow at all.

Let us bring this into everyday life. You are driving to work in the morning, and the road is jammed. The traffic is not in your hands. Whether you let them know you will be late for the meeting is. Whether you pound the steering wheel, or spend that half hour listening to something, is in your hands too. According to Epictetus, most human suffering comes from confusing these two lists. We treat the traffic as our own business, and we treat our anger as something that simply happens to us. In fact, the opposite is true.

One of Epictetus's most often quoted lines says exactly this: it is not things themselves that disturb people, but their judgments about those things. Death is not terrible, he says; what is terrible is the judgment that death is terrible. This should not be taken as a denial of real pain. Elsewhere, Epictetus speaks of a ship setting out on a voyage. You choose the captain, the crew, the day. But if a storm rises, your part is over. If the ship is sinking, the only thing left for you to do is to go down not in terror, but without fear.

It sounds beautiful. The trouble is that reading this in daylight over a cup of tea is one thing; putting it into practice at three in the morning while staring at the ceiling is quite another.

It is three twelve in the morning. Your phone screen lights up for a moment. No notification, just the time. Tomorrow morning a test result is coming back. Or the answer from a job interview will arrive. Or your child set off on the road at midnight and still has not texted to say "I made it." You toss and turn in bed. You know that thinking will not change a thing. The test result is already settled in the lab. The interview decision may have been made long ago. The road is the same road whether you sleep or not. And still, the mind will not let go. One scenario, then another, then a worse version of the first.

Why is knowing Epictetus's distinction not enough on nights like these? Why can we not let go of something we cannot control? Psychology looks at this question from several angles. One of them is the illusion of control. In nineteen seventy-five, the psychologist Ellen Langer published an experiment. She sold lottery tickets to people working in an office. Some were allowed to choose their own ticket; others simply had one handed to them. As the drawing approached, she asked to buy the tickets back. Those who had chosen their own ticket asked, on average, for more than four times as much money as those who had been handed one. Yet the odds of winning were exactly the same. The mere act of choosing created a feeling that we might, even slightly, influence the outcome.

Midnight anxiety works a little like this. The mind believes that thinking about something endlessly is a way of keeping it under control. As if, by letting go of the worry, we would be abandoning our post. As if, should something bad happen, being able to say "but I thought it through enough" would somehow protect us. Here, anxiety turns into a kind of magic. We stay awake like someone standing guard, yet there is nothing being guarded.

The second angle is intolerance of uncertainty. Researchers who study anxiety disorders observe that some people are troubled less by a bad outcome than by not knowing what the outcome will be. Sometimes a person actually feels relief on hearing bad news, because now they can do something. In uncertainty, there is nothing to hold on to. The mind fills that void with scenarios. And building scenarios feels like doing something.

The third angle is older, and more human. The things we are asked to let go of are very often the things we love. On Epictetus's list of what is not up to us are our body and our possessions. But the things that keep us awake at night are usually other people: a sick mother, an unemployed spouse, a child out on the road. Setting them aside as "not up to us" feels like a lack of love. Anxiety is held on to as a kind of proof of love.

Epictetus addressed this objection too, and his answer still sounds harsh today. In the Handbook, he says that when you kiss your child, you should remind yourself that you are kissing a mortal. If a jug you are fond of breaks, you are not distressed, because you knew it was a jug; carry the same awareness for the people you love. On first reading, it seems almost cruel. But what Epictetus is saying is not "do not love." What he is saying is this: know that what you love does not belong to you. It has been entrusted to you; you are not its owner. In his view, when we lose something, we should learn to say not "I have lost it," but "I have given it back."

Many people find this answer too cold, and rightly so. Telling someone sitting on the edge of the bed at three twelve in the morning to "remember the jug" is not much help. This is where Stoicism's strength lies, but it is also where its limit lies. It draws the distinction very sharply, yet it leaves one thing open. How do I keep doing the part that is in my hands, and to what do I surrender the part that is not? To the void, to fate, to the rational order of the universe?

The Stoics gave their own answer to this question. For them, the universe was a whole governed by reason, by the logos, and everything happened as it was meant to. But the same question was also asked in another civilization, in another language, in the middle of the desert, beside a camel. And there, the answer travelled from tongue to tongue for centuries, because it resolved the tension between action and letting go in a single sentence.

In the hadith collection of Imam al-Tirmidhi, there is a brief scene. A Bedouin comes to the Prophet with his camel and asks: Should I tie up my camel and then put my trust in God, or should I let it loose and put my trust in God? The answer is short: "Tie it, and put your trust in God."

In Turkish, this saying settled into the form "Tie your camel, then trust in God." Its power comes from making the question itself seem misplaced. The Bedouin believes he has to choose between two options: either he relies on his own precautions, or he relies on God. The answer tells him that these are not rivals. Tying the rope is the work of action; trusting is the work of the heart. Neither one takes the place of the other.

Even so, the concept of tawakkul, of trust in God, was always debated throughout the history of Islamic thought. In some Sufi circles, especially in the early centuries, there were those who understood tawakkul as abandoning every kind of precaution. There are stories of people who set out into the desert without provisions, who refused medicine when they fell ill, who considered pursuing a livelihood a sign of weak faith. Against this, a strong objection arose. A saying attributed to Sahl al-Tustari sums it up well: whoever condemns working to earn a living has condemned the Prophet's way, and whoever condemns trust in God has condemned faith itself. In other words, the two belong to separate layers, and one does not cancel the other.

One of the figures who treated this debate most systematically was al-Ghazali. At the end of the eleventh century, he gave up his brilliant teaching career in Baghdad and set out on a long search, and in his great work, the Revival of the Religious Sciences, he devotes an entire section to tawakkul. His tone is almost mocking. Someone who sits with food in front of him, does not reach out his hand, and waits for God to feed him, he says, has not attained trust in God; he has lost his mind. The same goes for someone who expects a harvest without sowing seed, or a child without marrying. For al-Ghazali, abandoning the means is not trust in God; it is ignorance. But clinging to the means and mistaking them for the true author of the outcome is another kind of error. You sow the seed, but you do not make the rain fall, and you do not bring the soil to life. Tawakkul is doing the work of your hands while binding your heart to the true author of the outcome. Al-Ghazali also divides tawakkul into degrees. At the lowest degree, a person is like a client who trusts a good representative. He has handed his case to a lawyer he trusts, and because of that, he is at ease. At a higher degree, he is like a child in his mother's arms. The child does not even think that his mother will protect him; he simply takes refuge in her. The point al-Ghazali draws our attention to is this: in both examples, the person is doing something. The client brings his case, the child runs to his mother. Tawakkul is not inaction. It is about what your action leans on.

A little more than a century later, in Konya, Rumi asks the same question, this time through a story. In the first book of the Masnavi, the animals of a forest have grown weary of a lion that attacks them every day. They bring the lion an offer: do not go out hunting, and every day we will send you one of our own. Leave your sustenance to God, and trust in Him. The lion objects, and a long debate begins between them. The animals argue for trust; the lion argues for effort. Through the lion's voice, Rumi refers to the famous hadith: the Prophet said aloud, trust in God, and tie your camel's knee. The one who earns his living is the beloved of God. If you trust in God, trust in Him in your work as well.

The interesting thing about the story is this: in the end, the animals win the debate, yet Rumi does not dismiss what the lion said. In the Masnavi's view, to work is to refuse to deny the hands and feet that God has given you. If you have been given an oar, that oar is a sign. But the real point is not to imagine, while you row, that you own the sea.

Here we can return to Epictetus and set the two ideas side by side. The slave from Hierapolis and the scholar from Tus draw the same line: what is your business, and what is not. Both ask you to do what is your business completely. Both tell you that the outcome does not belong to you. The difference lies at the other end of the rope. For Epictetus, at the other end there is an impersonal universe ordered by reason. To him, letting go is a wise acceptance. For al-Ghazali and Rumi, at the other end there is a Lord who is trusted, who loves, who sees. To them, letting go is surrender, but what you surrender to is not a void. It is Someone who hears you.

At three twelve in the morning, this difference becomes something important. Where the Stoic can only say, "this is not in my hands," the person who practices tawakkul can take one step further: "It is not in my hands, but it is not left to chance either." The folk saying "the planning is ours, the decree is God's" puts it simply. For a believer, this is consolation. And even for a non-believer, the idea that anxiety can be set down somewhere can, on its own, open a door.

This true meaning of tawakkul also offers a quiet answer to those who confuse it with laziness. The lazy person does not tie the rope, and when the camel is lost, he says, "It was fate." The anxious person ties the rope, then keeps watch beside it all night, then ties it again, then brings yet another rope. The person who practices tawakkul ties the rope firmly and goes to sleep. All three are looking at the same camel. What separates them is where they let go of the end of the rope.

So we tied the rope, we did all we could, and the camel ran away anyway. What then?

There are few people who do not know the weight of this question. A relative of someone who is ill does everything the doctors say, has every test done on time, gives every medicine on the hour, and still loses them. A student studies for a whole year and falls ill on the day of the exam. A shopkeeper puts all his savings into his shop, and a crisis wipes everything out. In such moments, the sentence "I did all I could" can be said in two ways. One with rebellion: I did it, but what good did it do? The other with a kind of peace: I did it, and the rest was never mine.

To describe this second attitude, the Stoics use a beautiful image. Cicero, in a work explaining Stoic ethics, gives the example of an archer. The archer does everything in his power to hit the target. He chooses his bow well, takes aim, reckons the wind, and releases the arrow. But once the arrow has left the bow, a gust may blow, or the target may shift. For the Stoics, the archer's true goal is not to strike the board, but to shoot well. Hitting the board is something preferred, but what is truly good is the shot itself.

We find a similar idea at another far end of the East. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the foundational texts of Indian thought, the god Krishna says to the warrior Arjuna, who hesitates on the battlefield: your right is to action alone, never to its fruits. Do not act for the sake of the fruit, and do not fall into inaction either. Three separate traditions, three separate languages, arriving at the same place: the effort belongs to you, the outcome does not. If we look at how this idea finds its echo in lives today, perhaps the most striking example is the American pilot James Stockdale. In September of nineteen sixty-five, his plane was shot down over North Vietnam. As he drifted down on his parachute, by his own account, he felt he was leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. He carried the Handbook he had read in his university years with him, in his memory. For roughly the next seven and a half years he remained a prisoner. He was tortured and held alone in a cell for long stretches. In his later writings, he explained that what kept him standing was that first distinction of Epictetus. He could not change the cell, the pain, or the guard. But his own honor, his loyalty to his fellow prisoners, what he would say and what he would refuse to say, those he still chose for himself. The words of an enslaved philosopher, spoken some nineteen hundred years earlier, had become the branch a man clung to in a prison camp.

The same idea quietly found its way into modern psychology as well. In the middle of the twentieth century, Albert Ellis, one of the pioneers of cognitive therapy, openly credited Epictetus when describing the roots of his approach, citing the line: "People are disturbed not by things, but by their judgments about things." Today, when a therapist asks, "Is this thought true, or is it your interpretation?", you can hear the echo of that small school in Nicopolis. The short prayer attributed to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, recited in support groups in many parts of the world, asks for the very same thing: the serenity to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

But perhaps the deepest legacy of this idea lies hidden not in books or in therapy rooms, but in an ordinary moment of farewell. Islamic thought calls the mature form of tawakkul "rida." Rida does not mean loving the outcome. No one is content to lose someone they love. Rida means ceasing to fight with what has happened. It means letting the wound remain where it is, while refusing to let it take over the whole of one's life. Let us recall al-Ghazali's image of the child in its mother's arms. When the child falls, it cries. Crying does not break trust. Even as it cries, it clings to its mother.

The peace carried in the sentence "I did everything I could" comes from here as well. This sentence is not a declaration of indifference. It is the settling of an account. It says: I have paid my share. I tied the rope, I loosed the arrow, I had the tests done, I knocked on the door. Carrying the outcome was never the work of my shoulders. Human shoulders were not made to carry outcomes; they can carry only effort. When we try to shoulder the outcome as well, we become that weary person staring at the ceiling at twelve minutes past three in the morning.

Epictetus taught in Nicopolis until the end of his life. According to tradition, he owned nothing in his house but a straw mat, a bed, and a lamp. One day his iron lamp was stolen. The next day he bought a clay lamp in its place, and he is said to have remarked: the thief could take from me no more than a lamp's worth. It could be stolen again tomorrow, and perhaps it will be. But Epictetus did not give up on the lamp, and he did not choose to sit in the dark. He bought a new lamp, lit it, and went on with his teaching.

Perhaps the whole matter is this simple. To tie the camel, to light the lamp, to loose the arrow. And then to leave the end of the rope, the fate of the light, and the path of the arrow to something greater than oneself. Letting go is not losing. Sometimes the only freedom left in a person's hands is the ability to open them.

We have come to the end of today's episode of Nöron Felsefe. Until we meet again in a new story.