Epictetus spent the first part of his life enslaved in Rome and the second part teaching philosophy from a small school in Nicopolis, on the Greek coast, where students sat on the floor of a rented room and copied down what he said because he never wrote anything himself. One line from those notes, preserved by his student Arrian in the handbook called the Enchiridion, is blunt enough to sound almost rude on first read: "Do not seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well." He is not recommending resignation. He is describing a trade — surrender the demand that the day arrange itself around a private wish list, and receive in exchange a mind that can meet whatever actually shows up without flinching.
Earlier in the same handbook he gives the mechanism behind the trade: "People are disturbed not by events, but by their judgments about events." A delayed train is neutral. A rude colleague is neutral. It is the running commentary — this should not be happening, this is unbearable, this is ruining everything — that manufactures the suffering, and that commentary is the one part of the transaction a person actually controls. Most complaint, on this account, is not a report on reality but a failed negotiation with it, an argument nobody can win because the other side, the world, was never a party to the wish in the first place. Stop arguing and the day gets lighter immediately, not later.
The Dhammapada, the collection of the Buddha's sayings compiled from early oral tradition, arrives at something close to this from a different direction. It describes a joyful, untroubled mind as one of the marks of a person walking the path well, and it treats that joy not as luck but as a skill built through repetition — the same way a hand gets steady through use. Buddhist teaching gives the specific habit a name: mudita, sympathetic joy, the deliberate practice of feeling glad at someone else's good fortune instead of measuring it against one's own shortfall. Where Epictetus trains the mind to stop fighting what happens to oneself, mudita trains it to stop begrudging what happens to someone else — two edges of the same discipline, both aimed at a mind that meets the world with its hands open rather than its arms crossed.
Put the two together and the instruction gets almost embarrassingly simple: agree with the morning before it has finished happening, and cheer, rather than wince, when the good arrives at someone else's door first.