by Jamesscotthenson | Feb 23, 2017 | Blog
Look at me getting things done sooner than I promised. It
looks like all of this will be more than a single blog.
The mindful aspect of Stoicism is what initially drew me to
it. There are, of course, differences between mindfulness and Stoicism,
especially as one is an established philosophy of life and the other is a way
of being present in the moment. That being said, all philosophies must be
practiced in the moment and all intentional ways of being have a philosophy
behind them; we wouldn’t practice them otherwise.
One of the primary areas of overlap seems to be in regard to
emotions. Both Stoicism and a mindful lifestyle encourage the recognition of
our emotions as being not necessarily “us”, and both recognize the importance
of not letting them run amok. The Stoics seem to place a little more emphasis
on regulating emotions than mindfulness does, and this brings charges of
repression and detachment, but these are things that mindfulness is charged
with as well.
I don’t think the issue is so much repression as it is
understanding that emotions are temporary, and that they are rarely good indicators
of the wisest path we can take.
Think of it this way. Someone you love makes you very angry.
Are your choices limited to believing the anger completely and letting it run
the show or refusing to acknowledge it, pretending you are fine and moving on?
Where did this dichotomy of flipping our shit versus
stuffing our anger down and developing heart disease come from?
There is another option.
We can feel our anger, we can acknowledge it and even
express it appropriately. We can know it is there – feel the sense of
injustice, the betrayal, the shaking fists, the shallow breathing, the pounding
heart and head. We can hear the thoughts racing to justify our position by
telling us we don’t deserve this, telling us the other person sucks and can go
to hell.
We can be present with all of this, we can fully experience
it, but we don’t have to turn everything over to it.
We can also remember that the other person is someone we
love. We can understand that they believe they are right, we can choose not to
pull the pin on a grenade in the middle of everything we care about. We can
have compassion for ourselves in our suffering, and, if we are mindful and
Stoic about it, we can have compassion for them in theirs as well. Compassion
opens doors to communication, anger shuts them.
All of this seems like a better outcome to me, and it can be
applied to all of our emotions.
Sadness, guilt, despair, frustration, and, unfortunately,
happiness, all come and go.
They don’t even last that long if we don’t feed them with
our thoughts or by indulging them.
Ask yourself just how much leash you want to give your
emotions today.
Can you feel them without letting them control you?
Express them without destroying relationships and things
you’ve built?
Can you let them have their place while still maintaining a
mindful awareness of what really matters?
Thanks for reading.
by Jamesscotthenson | Feb 22, 2017 | Blog
There are plenty of resources for anyone looking into
Stoicism, the difficult part today was actually just narrowing them down. Here
are a few of my favorites, everything has a link you can click.
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius. The most powerful man in the whole world keeps a
journal, we get to read it. Insightful, intelligent, compassionate and, above
all, useful. Meditations embodies what makes Stoicism a worthwhile philosophy.
I really like this
translation by Gregory Hays.
Ryan Holiday. I’ve mentioned him a few times over the
lifespan of this blog, and I am grateful for his impact on my life, and the
lives of others. Stoicism stands apart as a philosophy because it manages to be
applicable and relevant to our lives. I have a distaste for philosophies that
don’t offer anything apart from new ideas on what something may or may not
mean. Stoicism certainly goes beyond this. Here are some worthwhile Ryan
Holiday related links:
The Obstacle
is the Way
The Daily
Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living:
Featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius
The Tim
Ferriss Show, episode 4
The Time
Ferriss Show, episode 179
Amazon’s
Stoic Six-packs. Super cheap, super awesome. $9 for enough reading
material to last the rest of your life.
The Daily
Stoic website. This is such a phenomenal resource. If you are
subscribed to my blog, you know that daily emails can start to blend together
and that it is hard to keep things fresh, but I look forward to what I get from
them every day. Always worthwhile.
On the
Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca. This was life-changing
for me, I try to read it every so often. A profound exploration of the value of
time and how we spend it.
The Tao of
Seneca. A compilation of Seneca letters, in audio format. Very well
produced and engaging. The only difficult part is constantly pausing them to
make a note or write a quote down.
Anything and everything by Epictetus.
Looking Ahead:
We will wrap up our exploration of Stoicism this week with
two more virtues and a look at Stoicism and compassion. I have the loose idea
for a blog on Stoicism and mindfulness as well, I am just not sure if I will
get to it this week.
I am in the process of trying to refocus Dying Daily, it is
easy to get lost in the weeds when you are trying to crank out 500+ words every
morning, but this has always been as much about the discipline and commitment
as anything else. I see certain trends emerging as we near the six-month mark,
so I am going to try to center on those more and more as we move forward.
Thank you for reading, I am grateful for every view, click,
comment and suggestion.
by Jamesscotthenson | Feb 21, 2017 | Blog
Continuing on with unpopular virtues and ideas derived from
my reading of Stoic philosophy, though this one has a lot to do with reading
about ancient cultures in general.
It’s funny to me that I am writing this, because all of the
virtues we are looking at are things I would and did openly reject when I was
younger. For a very long time I rejected them because they weren’t cool, which
really just meant they interfered with my quest to blindly follow my emotions
and desires and be all big and bad and uncontrollable. Once I got educated and
super smart, I developed a more structured reason for refusing to adopt these
antiquated notions of human behavior.
At least, I would bet I said something like that.
Duty is an odd one, and seems increasingly unpopular. We
live in a culture where many of us don’t feel like we owe the social order
anything at all. Maybe it’s the result of most of our needs being met, maybe
it’s the division in our society, or maybe we are just becoming lazy and
narcissistic, but we don’t really buy into the notion that we have a debt and a
responsibility to our fellow humans anymore.
The more I think about it, phrases like “It’s not my
problem” make less and less sense to me. From the day we are born, we live in
this web of dependence on other people. Someone took the time to carry you
around in their body for 9 months, and take care of you after birth because
human babies are completely useless. They can’t even roll over. This expands
outward for the rest of lives as we live in houses that other people built, use
technologies that other people invented and eat food that other people helped
get to our plate. Sure, some people are more self-sufficient than others, but
we are all dependent in many, many ways.
In this light, and the fact that we are all sharing space,
saying something is not our problem or misbehaving and wreaking havoc isn’t
just uncool or annoying, it’s illogical and vaguely suicidal. It reminds me of
a video I saw once where this pig is peeing in the water trough he is drinking
out of. Not super smart.
This can be seen in many places. There are the obvious
things like people committing crimes and robbing and assaulting others and
taking more than their share by nefarious means and using other humans as
pawns, but there are subtler ways as well. Turning away from trouble, ignoring
someone in need, not pitching in when there is a disaster, not participating in
any sort of group or social events, all the way down to throwing trash out the
window of your car and running red lights. I think a case could be made for all
of these being anti-social, in the literal sense of the word.
I am not a civic saint myself, and I do not participate in
things near as much as I think I should, but I am trying to do better. I am
also working out where we draw the line with helping others and taking care of
ourselves, and what we owe society versus what it owes us. It’s all a work in
progress.
What do you feel your responsibility to society is?
What are the limits or boundaries on this?
Do we have any obligation to the social order?
by Jamesscotthenson | Feb 20, 2017 | Blog
Looking more in depth at Stoicism leads us to the virtues
they valued. None of them are all that popular today, starting with wisdom.
This is a much misused and maligned word. It’s meaning seems
to be difficult to pin down, but we know wisdom when we see it.
Or it would be good if we did.
So what is wisdom?
I am not sure I get to corner the market on defining it, but
I see wisdom in many things.
I see it in knowledge that goes beyond “book smarts”.
It was a shock to my system when I started noticing that
many of the most well-educated people I’ve met are also among the most foolish
and dysfunctional. Degrees and books don’t make a person wise. Ten years in
academic settings has actually made wonder if there is an inverse relationship
there.
Wisdom and good character go hand-in-hand for some reason.
I am not sure which one creates the other, but I suspect it
works in a sort of self-reinforcing loop. A little bit of wisdom leads us
toward good character and good character leads us toward wisdom. They feed off
each other until we have a very wise person sitting in front of us.
I do not believe a person can be wise and of bad character.
Maybe this is what has led wisdom to being a virtue that
many disregard. I think we’ve come to a place where we see it as antiquated or
unnecessary. Maybe we see it as judgmental or rigid since it requires something
of us and the people around us (if we truly care about them). We have created a
culture that rewards smart people with bad character, we prize someone who is
clever and unscrupulous. People we would have exiled from the tribe or simply
killed in the past thrive in our current social structure.
Wisdom implies experience.
There is a depth to the understanding of a wise person that
can only come from having lived their truth, from having steeped in it until it
settles into their bones. This cannot be pulled from books or lectures or
online courses. It is probably another reason wisdom is out of fashion: we like
our information in the form of top ten lists, and we get annoyed if we have to
click to another page for each bullet point. We have been taught to like
microwaves, not slow-cookers.
So wisdom is hard to define, but easy to recognize when we
see it, if we are really looking. It is something that someone can fake, but
not for very long. Their lack of wisdom will be revealed somehow: through their
actions, their relationships, what they do under stress, how they treat the
people below them, how they use their time, how they deal with anger. Something
will cause the mask to slip.
Wisdom is a total way of being, you cannot pretend to it for
very long.
There is one thing I know for certain about wisdom, and that
is that I am lacking it in very many places. I am fortunate, however, to have
many wise people near me who offer guidance and advice, and tell me when I am
headed in the wrong direction.
I suppose the wisest thing I can do is to listen to them.
Thank you for reading, have a great day.
by Jamesscotthenson | Feb 19, 2017 | Blog
Stoicism isn’t new, and it’s not something I “discovered”.
Someone asked me to touch on the basics of it, so we will do that over that the
next few days, but there are better resources out there. Ryan Holiday, in
particular, has some great work on it. You can’t go wrong by going straight to
the source either: Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius come to mind
immediately. I’ll list some specific resources on Sunday.
There are few things you have control over, but your
character is one of them, and this is something you always have control over.
People can do what they want to you, they can say anything about you, but you
always have control over how you respond to them. If we look at it, our
response to things largely determines our character, which is cool because it
gives us a locus of control at all times.
Entertain an idea with me.
External events are neutral, because they are outside your
control.
Assigning things outside ourselves a morality or “objective”
value is odd, because we cannot control them.
Is the moon good or bad?
The Grand Canyon?
Gravity?
Apple trees?
We may like or dislike these things depending on their
impact on us, but that doesn’t really tell us anything about them. The Grand
Canyon is great if you have fond memories of a family vacation there as a kid,
terrible if your family fell off the edge while taking a selfie on that trip. A
full moon is awesome if you’re on a date, terrible if you are trying to rob
your neighbor. Gravity is cool, but it also keeps me from flying, which sucks.
Events are very much the same.
How we feel about them often just depends on how they impact
us, either physically or emotionally or how they change our lives. For some people
this last election was a tragedy of historic proportions, for others it was a
victory for the forces of righteousness and virtue. Both sides would tell me
“objectively” why their perspective is right, and this would seem self-evident
to them. This was true of every other election we’ve had, and with the rise of
dictators and reformers alike in other countries.
How we respond to events tells us about us, not the events.
We can focus on events or we can focus on our reaction to
them. We only have control over one of these, and only one of these has
anything to do with our character. The events themselves have nothing to do
with this.
It’s odd to me that things that things like this have become
important to me, because I would have rejected any notion of them in the past.
I needed to believe that the things that happened were the problem, not me.
This left me out of control, and at the whim of external forces and my
emotions. I blamed everything and everyone else, never looking at myself.
I suppose this had something to do with my character.
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