14.10.2026 Diary XLIV Hypomone: staying under the load

14.10.2026 Diary Page XLIV

Waiting can be light or heavy. Enduring is the name of the heavy one.

Wednesday. Yesterday, in the epokhe entry, I said that waiting is often free. Today I need to correct that. Not every wait is free. In some of them you wait while carrying something.

Today's word is hypomone.

The load inside the word

Hypomone is made of two parts. Hypo means under. Menein means to stay, to stand your ground. Put together, you get "to stay under." The verb hypomenein also means to endure, to stand in place and face something.

The movement in the word matters. The person who stays under does not run away. The load is on the shoulders, the feet are planted. I have read that in classical Greek the verb was also used in the sense of standing your ground in front of the enemy, but I am not sure enough to list the examples one by one.

The Turkish word tahammül draws the same picture. It comes from the Arabic root hml, and this root means carrying a load. Two languages, unaware of each other, have put patience in the same place: a load and someone carrying it.

The word sabır, patience, is also Arabic. Its origin is less clear to me, so I am not writing about it.

In the New Testament

Hypomone is a word that appears often in the New Testament. Its best-known place is the fifth chapter of the Letter to the Romans, verses three and four. According to the text attributed to Paul, suffering produces hypomone. Hypomone produces tested character, and tested character produces hope.

I look at this text not with the eye of faith but with the eye of words. And I like the order of the words: first the load, then enduring, then a kind of soundness, and hope at the very end. Hope is not at the start. First you stay under.

In Latin translations the equivalent of this word became patientia. Patientia comes from the verb pati, to suffer, to undergo. The English patience comes from there too. So the ancestor of what we call "patience" in Western languages is also the name of a suffering.

Long temper

Another word appears in the same texts: makrothymia. Makros means long, thymos means anger or spirit. Someone long-breathed, whose anger comes late.

Some commentators separate the two like this: makrothymia is patience toward people, hypomone is patience toward circumstances, events, the load. Putting up with someone versus putting up with a situation. I have read that this is not a rule, more of a tendency. But this distinction is useful to me, because I always mixed the two up.

Being patient with a person is one job. Being patient with a delay, a wait, the slowness of a process is another. In the second, there is no one with a face in front of me. No one to get angry at. Only me and the time that does not pass.

The Stoics' fire

The Stoics looked at hardship differently. Seneca, in De Providentia, describes hardship as a testing ground. He has a sentence saying that fire tests gold, and misfortune tests strong people. I am not sure whether the Greek word for endurance for the Stoics was hypomone or karteria. Both are around. But the idea is shared: what is hard shows who a person is.

Part of me moves toward this idea, part of me moves away. I move toward it because it is true that I get to know myself under a load. I move away because not every hardship is a test. Sometimes it is just hard.

The escape reflex

What a person with ADHD knows best is escaping. In a boring task, in a long wait, in a process that moves slowly, the same thing always happens to me. First my leg starts moving. Then the phone is in my hand. Then an excuse appears and I am in another room.

Hypomone is the exact opposite of this. Staying in place. I had found staying in place hard long before I met this word.

Time blindness is part of it too. While waiting, ten minutes can feel like an hour to me. And when I get absorbed in a task, I look up when it is done and an hour has passed like ten minutes. I described this in the time blindness article. The weight of a wait does not depend only on its length, it also depends on how I feel that length.

There is something I ask myself. Is what I cannot bear the waiting itself, or the voice that keeps turning inside me while I wait?

Twenty-two years

I got my diagnosis when I was twenty-two. Before that, for twenty-two years, I endured something without knowing its name.

Can I call this hypomone? Part of me says yes. In those years I stayed in place; there were many things I dropped, but I did not give up on myself.

The other part of me keeps asking. How much of this load was really a load I had to carry, and how much of it had I simply got used to? Getting used to something and enduring it are not the same. When you get used to it, you no longer feel the weight of the load. When you endure, you feel it and you still stand.

That is the beautiful side of the word, too. Hypomone includes feeling. It does not describe an endurance that does not ache.

Part of the load I had got used to came back as burnout. I did not know that back then.

Waiting for the medication

I tried medication for the second time when I was twenty-eight. There was a wait there too.

I wanted the answer to "is it working" right away, and the answer did not come right away. The answer to how long to wait is not mine to give, it is the doctor's. The article what to expect from medication treatment looks at this question with real information.

What is mine is what I felt while waiting. Hope and fear sit side by side. Hope says "this time," fear says "what if it fails again." Carrying both at once is, in the most literal sense, staying under the load.

What I remember from those days is this: the wait itself is often more tiring than the result.

Not submission

It is easy to read hypomone as passivity. But the word does not say that. The person who stays under is moving: keeping their place, balancing the load, not letting go.

Submission is something else entirely. It is stopping asking whose load it is. Carrying it without asking why I carry it.

While studying law I learned something early. The life of a case file is spent in time limits, hearing dates and waiting. Half of seeking your rights is waiting. But that waiting has a direction. You wait toward an outcome. Waiting without direction is not law, it is stalling.

I think the same about hypomone. If staying under the load has a meaning, its name is endurance. If it does not, it is just being stuck.

So I leave myself a question: what is the thing I am staying under today moving toward?

Without loving it, without accepting it

In the amor fati entry I asked whether it is about loving what happens or accepting it. Hypomone stands somewhere between the two, and I think that is the most honest place. You do not have to love the load. You do not have to say "I'm glad it happened" to it either. You just stay in place.

This comforts me. Because I thought that to endure, I first had to give my heart to the load. It turns out I don't.

While walking

The place where enduring feels easiest to me is walking. When I climb a hill in Ankara the weight does not change, but because my body is moving, carrying it gets lighter. Sitting at a desk and waiting is the opposite: the load is the same, but stillness makes it bigger.

Maybe what we call hypomone is not always standing motionless where you are. Maybe staying in place can also mean moving without letting go of your direction. I don't know this yet; it stays a question.

In the hexis entry I wrote that repetition builds something. Enduring may also be built by repetition: one hour today, an hour and ten minutes tomorrow.

A piece next to the concept

Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings (1936).

Barber made this piece by arranging the slow movement of the string quartet he wrote in 1936 for string orchestra. It was first played in 1938 under Toscanini, in a radio broadcast. Adagio means slow tempo.

The piece moves like a single long sentence. It starts low, rises step by step, reaches a peak. There everything stops for a moment. Then the same sentence returns, this time quieter. It is known as a piece often played at funerals and memorial ceremonies.

Its link with hypomone is that it has a slowness that carries a load. Nothing speeds up, nothing runs away. Heavy, but moving forward.

Toward tomorrow

Tomorrow is Thursday. Today I talked about staying under the load; tomorrow I want to look at where that load comes from. Anamnesis: remembering. According to Plato, learning is a kind of remembering. Maybe the load is waiting somewhere to be remembered.