Thoughts on Mindfulness

This aspect of Stoic philosophy was a big seller for me. I’d already recognized that there were several similarities between Stoicism and other avenues I’d explored in trying to organize my thinking but mindfulness has always been a major aspect of what I was trying to accomplish. A smart person once wrote: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Where did I want to go? More precisely, who am I and who did I want to be? Marcus Aurelius is supposed to have said: “Waste no more arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

Marcus Aurelius is supposed to have said: “Waste no more arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” There was nothing particularly wrong with the way I was drifting 20 years ago, an unfortunate choice here and there usually unintentional, but I was adrift. Having dealt with the self-destructive behaviors – the smoking and drinking – was I good to go or could I do better? What does it take to spend a heartbeat or two before the act to consider what it is that I’m about to do and the outcomes I might expect from it? There’s nothing wrong with watching football except that it’s about 3 hours of your life that you’ll never get back and you don’t accomplish anything. Is that what I want to do?

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Someone asked on a message board this morning if Stoicism was of any value in a war zone, and it came to me that it is because life goes on. The population and even the combatants are making choices every moment of every day: there’s nothing I can do about this or this, but I can still do something about that. Children laugh and play, people marry, rebuild homes (perhaps a tent for the time being), they do what they are able to do given the circumstances that are not theirs to control. Granted that a lot of that is instinctive behavior and perhaps not mindful but it does appear to be more purposeful.

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