Start smaller than feels serious

Epictetus tells the beginner to start with small things. A little oil spilled, a little wine stolen: say to yourself, this is the price of equanimity. Practice on the cheap losses first.

There is a reason the advice targets small things and not large ones. The large occasions are rare, arrive without warning, and are the worst possible conditions for trying something for the first time. The small ones happen daily and cost almost nothing to fail at.

This cuts against the instinct to save the practice for when it matters. By that logic you will practice a handful of times a year, always under the worst conditions, and conclude the practice does not work.

A practice for this week

Deliberately minor

1. Choose one small recurring annoyance: the slow queue, the interrupted sentence, the misplaced object.
2. Decide in advance which practice from this series you will apply to it, every time it occurs.
3. Apply it at that scale only, for one week. Resist upgrading to bigger problems.
4. At the end of the week, note whether the response is becoming automatic.

Nothing here says your large problems must wait, and a genuine crisis takes whatever response it takes. The claim is about training order: a response rehearsed on spilled oil is the one that shows up, already practiced, on the day something real breaks.