Category: Stoicism

Epictetus

Epictetus, a former slave turned Stoic philosopher, came up with the key Stoic concept of focusing only on what one can control and ignoring anything beyond one’s control. You can see how someone who was a slave might become very familiar with the second half of this concept, as slave’s have little control over what befalls them.

Most people are very focused on the first part of this axiom — concentrate on what one can control. But the second part — ignoring what one cannot control — is also very liberating, for why waste any time on things one cannot even influence, and so much of modern life falls into this latter category. Best to just ignore such things entirely, although this can be difficult when they are threatening.

Discipline

Ignore It?

Should one just ignore the news?

It is usually of the clamorous and disastrous variety. So it is is a huge stressor, and who needs the stress? Plus, one can’t do much about whatever it is anyway.

So why pay any attention to it at all? Just ignore it, for one’s mental health.

In Stoicism, they tell you to concentrate on what is under your control, but ignore everything else — that would include the news, in my opinion

You see these people who never miss a single headline, and it is just making them crazier, although they may not realize it.

Nutrition and Health

Freedom from Death

When you make it to your 70s, and even earlier for some, you begin to see death as real and much more likely, even conceivably in the short term, than when you were younger and death was mere abstraction. 

This realization brings with it a kind of acceptance — that your time now is indeed limited and no matter what you do, your death is unavoidable. This realization, oddly enough, introduces a strange kind of fatalism that frees one from being too concerned with death. 

And that fatalism gives one a new kind of liberation from the fear of death when you completely accept the fact that you will indeed die and perhaps sooner rather than later.

Quinoa and Buckwheat

“Indifference To Failure”

Versus all the other negative emotional and perhaps irrational reactions to failure that really have no benefit at all and probably a lot of downside.  Instead, indifference to failure — a more cavalier attitude toward trying difficult things but failing in the short term, which is highly likely.  No doubt an attitude that would make the path to eventual success so much easier, as one might be less prone to being stymied by immediate failure.  Plus there’s also the idea that failure is often instructive — that there can be something positive about it.  It tells you something about what you are trying to do or perhaps something you didn’t know about yourself.

Challenges

One often exaggerates little challenges way out of proportion to their actual size.  One recognizes this when confronted with real challenges, of significant dimension, that are nevertheless tackled by those people afflicted by them.  One then feels a little bit ashamed by one’s own silly exaggeration.

I was sitting in a coffee shop and downing a large cup of coffee, while observing the people pass by on a busy city sidewalk, an activity that I enjoy — observing people.  You actually perceive a lot if you step aside a moment from your busy life, and take some time to consciously observe the people around you.

I watched a blind person negotiate the button for a cross walk.  With her cane, she felt the end of the curb where it curves upward in order to find the post that contained the button.  She listened to the traffic to hear when it was time to cross, and then felt the surface of the bumpy crosswalk, again with her cane, to know the direction to walk in to get across the road.  Despite the blindness, she did all this very efficiently — clearly this particular section of her walk was very familiar to her.  But think about that — negotiating the busy streets of a major city blind.

I watched a cripple in a wheelchair make his way pushing the wheelchair with just one good foot and leg — but always moving backwards, that is, with his back always facing the direction he was moving in.  Just try to imagine that.  And just try to imagine that as the only way you can get around — sitting in a wheelchair and pushing it backwards with one foot.

I watched a madman beggar carrying on a gibberish conversation with each person who passed him by, as though they were actually interacting with him, instead of hurrying by to escape him.  Periodically, the man uttered, involuntarily, a shrill birdlike catcall that interrupted his otherwise unintelligible statements, for he was speaking in a language no other human being could positively understand, except that his soulful eyes were beseeching desperately — the message from the eyes was clear, even though his language was from Mars.  Now and then someone put a dollar in his cup, no doubt with the thought, there but for the grace of god go I.

I watched a very old woman with a severe case of osteoporosis, bent like a right-angle   T-square, and therefore forced to always look down at her toes, make her way with tiny steps, grudgingly, along the sidewalk, periodically having to crane her neck severely sideways to see if she was about to walk into anything.  Her entire world had been reduced to her toes.

By the time I finished my coffee, I didn’t feel quite so put out by my little troubles, but was struck by how cruel life can be.   No question, there is a significant number of people who must endure dreadful things…and it will always be so.

The ancient Stoics had a mental trick for chasing away the blues.  It was a kind of negative visualization where you consciously tried to think of the worst possible thing that could happen to you and the consequences — for instance, losing your legs or the aforementioned going blind, etc.  The idea was that by comparison to such awful eventualities, your present condition should seem quite benign, and so you hopefully gain some perspective.  I contend no such visualization is necessary to do this.  You just have to open your eyes.

My Story

Do Without

It’s a good practice to learn how to do without.  Particularly things that become a habit. TV, Facebook, Youtubes, cell phones, coffee, etc.  Periodically just do without them for a while.  Cut that dependence so that you know that you can, so that you know you are not a slave to these non-essentials — you control them, they don’t control you.

My Story