The Way I See It

Today is a bit of a toughie for me. The Stoic idea of nature is a bit of a challenge for me to grasp, and I’m going to lunch this afternoon with a friend and that very much goes to my personal nature.

Stoics are said to consider nature on three planes: our inner nature which includes our capacity for reason, the nature of society and our relationship with mankind, and the nature of our external or physical environment as a whole. I am suspicious of the latter two because they are not things over which we have control other than in our attitude.

We are Earthlings in what is arguably an infinite Universe. Climate change is arguably a thing. All that’s left then is how and where we live within our environment. Our capacity to control the nature of society and our relationship with mankind is impossibly speculative, but I see no evidence that they’re likely to listen to you now if they weren’t listening to you before. All that’s left then is how I am to relate to nature. Am I to live in harmony with my environment? Am I to painfully stand out like a boil on the ass of my environment? (Sorry; I get a little political.)

Someone I cared about kicked me to the curb not too long ago because I didn’t take up every cause that she cared deeply about. I do what I feel that I can do, and I give what I can give freely. I love dogs, for instance, more freely than I do people, but if I were to shelter homeless dogs before seeking shelter myself I’d never get indoors again.

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For some time now I’ve been taking a moment before hitting “Send” to consider whether it would fulfill a need rather than a want, and if it was the right thing to do. It’s become pretty much of a habit now, and I’m happy with it. I’m also less likely to say “yes” to every volunteer opportunity that gets sent to me which has caused me a little angst but feels right to me.

Again, I don’t know whether or not I’m a “true” Stoic or something else according to the wonks at Stoicon, but I do recognize a capacity for reason and a level of discernment and conscience within myself. If I continue to respect and honor that in my behavior and commit to trying to do a better job every day as the fates allow, I think I’m in pretty good shape.

It’s been an interesting week, but don’t get used to daily posts here. That isn’t happening.

Stoicism teaches that instead of thinking about the bad luck that has befallen us, we might better reflect on our capacity to survive and recover from it. Again, I think I got a head start on this with an ingrained attitude that “this, too, shall pass.”

Someone recently wrote to me that, although she was thankful for her home and her health, she had nothing in front of her to move toward, that she was just breathing. Perhaps we sometimes set the bar too high for ourselves. There are millions of people who would move heaven and earth for health and a place to call home.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” If I were to attempt to come up with a summary for resilience it would have to do with regarding any untenable situation from the perspective of moving forward past it. I don’t know if that even makes sense, but I don’t see giving up as a viable option.

When I assess an area’s resilience to recover from a disaster there are things we traditionally look at such as the population’s education, competence in English, income earners per household, adults per household with children. It occurs to me that none of those criteria are deal breakers. A disadvantaged condition may delay community recovery but recovery remains possible if there’s the will.
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A friend of mine was and still is stuck in a job that pays her bills but gives her no joy. She has an unrealized dream to become a pastry chef  but every time the subject comes up in conversation it has consisted of reasons why she can’t do it. She’s right. There will always be a thousand reasons why something might not work, and if that’s our focus no way forward is likely to ever be found.

Stoicism teaches us to differentiate between elements over which we have a level of control and elements that are not ours to control, and to concentrate our efforts on those aspects of our lives that are ours to control. As in the Serenity Prayer, there are things we cannot change but plenty of things that we can change, and one of the most important of those is our capacity to change. There’s a word for that; I think it’s resilience.

This is going to be kind of a cheat because I have no intention of leaving my apartment today. Any work on relationships today will be theoretical, involve people knocking on my door, or via e-mail.

Stoicism, as we commonly think of it is actually “small s” stoicism as it’s been picked up in the vernacular. Stoicism teaches  we are naturally inclined to care for other people and to become involved in their communities. Musonius Rufus wrote that “a virtuous person displays love for his fellow human beings as well as goodness, justice, kindness, and concern for his neighbor.” That’s all well and good but I was a foster kid from my 7th birthday until my 14th after which I was essentially an emancipated minor so that’s a developmental need. The military taught me about teams and teammates, etc., but in my experience, that’s not as large an umbrella as you might think mostly involving dealing with external threats.

This background has actually worked for me since I retired because whatever I  do now  is done without expectation of anything in return. Many people with whom I volunteer are disappointed that so much of the grunt work goes unnoticed, and I do recognize that and make an effort to commend folks whatever their contributions are. I’m thankful for the opportunity to do meaningful work that gets me out of bed, out of the apartment, and that I enjoy.

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Spoiler alert! We do have differences! The question then is what is the impact of those differences on us? On me? I have friends who are vegan, others who are vegetarian, and others and me who are carnivores. I do not judge others based on their diet. I have friends who are heterosexual, friends who are homosexual, and at least one friend who is transsexual. I do not judge others based on their gender identity or sexual preferences with respect to consenting adults.

I am having an issue with a couple of friends who will not be voting as I will next month, and that pains me, but we’ve had that conversation and they believe that they are correct and will vote their conscience as I will. I’m not at equanimity yet, but that’s on me and not on them.

Folks who knew me back in the day might have a problem picturing me trying to be virtuous, but Stoic philosophy teaches that the only thing with real value is what they call “virtue” or excellence of character. Oh, I’m still a long, long way from excellence of character.

The core virtues of Stoicism are mastery of our desires, mastery over our fears, kindness and fairness in our relationships, and wisdom in our moral and practical choices. Virtue, in Stoic terms, refers to fulfilling the potential within ourselves to perfect our own nature to be good. It includes not only living in our own skins in accord with our own nature as rational human beings but also concordant with the rest of mankind and Nature. I feel like I do okay without a lot of creature comforts, but I have a lot of work to do learning to deal with difficult people with good grace, patience, and equanimity.

Much of my impatience with schools of philosophy has less to do with their practices than with their pedagogy. Whether it was my little philosophical hodgepodge or my version of zen practice or my take on Stoic philosophy I’ve had a pretty consistent goal throughout. At the beginning of each day, I remind myself to try to do better. I feel that although that is neither specific nor easily measurable, it is achievable, relevant, and time-bound Things seem to get more complicated and further into the weeds when one tries to conform to a particular discipline.

It is now Thursday of Stoic Week and the philosophy majors, graduate students, and Ph.D.s are deep into their seminars back in New York. The discussion boards are filling with whether it as Zeno of Citium or Chrysippus who said something back around 300 BCE and what they meant by it. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed anyway just trying to get through to whatever’s on the other side as best I can, and when we get into these academic discussions of minutiae my eyes tend to glaze over.
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I do have it on pretty good authority that Marcus Aurelius in about 160 AD wrote: “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” He also wrote: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” When someone writes that something seems more Epicurean than Stoic I feel comfortable paying it no mind. I’m sure that it seems right to them and it makes no difference to me.

So far I feel like I’ve made a little progress today. Tomorrow I’ll try to do a little better.

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.

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.