First Day of Stoic Week

This week will be a departure from my usual writing because I’m participating in Stoic Week, and I’m supposed to document my meditations. I have no idea what that’s about but I have a week.

I’ve always been agnostic. I think it may have come from my being a foster kid and not believing in anything as a rule but I don’t know. Religion just never made sense to me. At some point when I was about 10-12 I came up with an idea that this was all there was and that hell was coming back over and over and over again until we got it right and didn’t have to come back. When I learned a bit about Buddhism in Japan and that it was okay with them if you just ignored any bits and pieces you weren’t buying I started practicing my hodge-podge version of Zen.

When I learned a bit about Buddhism in Japan and that it was okay with them if you just ignored any bits and pieces you weren’t buying I started practicing my hodge-podge version of Zen. That actually served me pretty well but there was a nagging feeling that I couldn’t really be any kind of Buddhist if I’d dismissed all of the parts about Buddhism. Then recently I began looking into Stoicism.

Stoicism, as I understand it, holds that our purpose, our happiness, is to be found in living life in harmony with nature. Nature doesn’t strictly refer to Bambi but to our natural surroundings: our fellow man and the world around us. We are to use our native wisdom which distinguishes us from other creatures to live in harmony, in virtue if you will. I’m putting this badly but it’s okay. I’m no saint for certain, but a young friend of mine told me recently that I was a good man and that was as proud as I’ve been of anything in a while.

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Meditations. I’ve never been good at guided meditations. I do have thoughts from time to time that I wish I could remember long enough to write down. I had some doozies driving down to the office and back today.

Here’s a Stoic teaching I saw today: “Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man’s power to live long.” (Seneca, On the Futility of Half-Way Measures, 17)

I’ll try to do better tomorrow, and today’s not over yet.