Every day imagine death and other misfortunes...

Donald's Commentary on The Handbook of Epictetus #21

Keep before your eyes day by day death and exile, and everything that seems terrible, but most of all death; and then you will never have any abject thought, nor will you yearn for anything beyond measure.

Commentary

This seems to be a clear reference to the famous Stoic practice, which Seneca called praemeditatio malorum, in Latin, or the premeditation of adversity. In Greek, this was apparently called proendemein, which basically means “dwelling on something in advance”. Epictetus clearly recommended this to students as a daily Stoic contemplative practice. We’re regularly to picture things like death, exile, and anything that we consider catastrophic, but especially our own death.