BONUS: You Know, You Can Do Something

The Stoics said it over and over: the most important thing to remember about pain and suffering is that it is inevitable. It can’t be avoided, so don’t make it worse by fearing it, worrying about whether it will come, wondering how bad it will be. Seneca’s line was that we suffer more in imagination than in reality. The essential insight from Epictetus was: It’s not things that upset us, it’s our opinion about them. And Marcus Aurelius too: If you choose to feel like you’ve been harmed, you have been. At just eight years old, Verity Smith was told that, due to a rare genetic disorder, she would soon lose her eyesight. She didn’t have a choice. She would be blind. All that was left to her was how she would respond to this demand of fate. In our interview with Verity, we asked her to take us back to that diagnosis and how she came to terms, mentally and emotionally, with the painful realities of losing her vision. Her answer is extraordinary:I saw going blind as a challenge, a game...I understood that the darkness was coming and that it would steal the faces of those I loved and the views of the landscapes I lived in, but in my innocence, I set to work filling my memory with images that would never fade. It was a game against the clock. My challenge was to drink in every sight, to exercise every sense and to become good at being blind before the lights went out. With my bedroom curtains drawn and a blindfold on, I would rearrange my furniture in order to practice navigating through self-imposed blackouts. Being a practical child, I figured the best way to overcome my coming blindness was to learn how to get good at being blind…I began to understand the power of my thoughts—how if the sky was grey I could color it in blue in my mind’s eye, how I could paint the beautiful horizon upon the canvas of the dullest of views. The world became multi-dimensional. As my eyes went to sleep my other senses awoke.When adversity struck, Marcus liked to remind himself, “It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it...It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.” Not everyone would choose to see something so unfair as a game, like Verity did. Not everyone could do that, as she did. So in that sense, it is fortunate that it happened to her. Certainly, what she managed to make of it is incredibly impressive and fortunate. Since being unable to compete in the 2012 and 2016 Olympic games, Verity has been training hard for the 2020 games in Tokyo. In 2017, she was ranked 12th in France at the Elite Able-Bodied level and has recently been selected for the French Para Dressage Team. Aside from her plans to bring home a gold medal in 2020, Verity also hopes to become the first equestrian disabled athlete to represent her country as a member of both the Paralympic and Olympic teams. She made her situation a game...and became world class at playing it. That’s what a Stoic does. That’s what you can do, whatever you’re going through today or in the future. You choose how you respond. You choose what you will make of this. You don’t have to suffer. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

2 Maalis 20204min

Ryan uses eight Stoic lessons to teach us how to have the best week ever.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

1 Maalis 20208min

This week's extra-long Saturday episode of Ask Daily Stoic features Ryan talking about, and speaking with, author Steven Pressfield, writer of classic books such as The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and The War of Art.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

29 Helmi 202032min

Life is a dirty, dusty affair. It was that way in Rome and it’s that way today. The puddle in the street splashes us. Someone else’s nasty mood sullies our demeanor. The heat makes us sweat. The news of the world makes us worried. We spill some food, we spill out some frustration. We wake up in the morning fresh and ready to go and by the end of the day, we are covered in dust. The dust of emotions, of work, of stress, of everything. The Stoics knew this and they knew also that it was critical to find ways to, as Marcus Aurelius put it, wash away the dust of earthly life. There were many ways to do this, literally and figuratively. Seneca noted that Socrates liked to play music and to play games with children to relax and have fun. Cato liked to have long meals over wine where philosophy was discussed. We also know from stories that he would frequent Roman baths, as did Seneca, where the grime of the city could be scrubbed away, but where also they might have some time to think. Even that observation from Marcus Aurelius, in its fuller context, gives us an insight. Marcus was talking about washing away the dust of earthly life by taking a moment to look up at the stars at night. And where was he “talking” about this? In the journal where he often retreated to clear his mind and his soul; where he could find solace and hold himself accountable at the same time. Stoicism and journaling—as we show in The Daily Stoic Journal—are hard to separate for that reason. The question for you, today and always, is how are you washing yourself clean and clear? Do you have a fun hobby? Do you meditate? Is it a weekly therapy session? Is it swimming laps? Maybe it’s the time after the kids go to bed when you and your spouse read and talk? Maybe it’s a morning walk or an evening prayer?It certainly can’t be just two weeks of vacation every year. It can’t just be a shower every couple days. It has to be a practice. It has to be a process. This is a dirty, dusty world we live in. And without ritual cleaning, even the purest and strongest souls will become filthy and corrupted. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

28 Helmi 20202min

The Stoic writings alternate between reminding us of our humility and our power. For humility, we have the concept of amor fati, for example—we should learn to love our fate, “good or bad” because we’re powerless to do anything about it. And with equal sincerity, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that if something is humanly possible, he should believe he is capable of doing it. Humility and power. Power and humility. It’s not a contradiction. It’s a balance. On some days we need a reminder of the former, and on other days, the latter. Today, let’s do the latter. How’s this: The Stoics believed each of us was a god. As Cicero writes in his dialog, Scipio’s Dream: “The true self of each person is the mind. Know therefore that you are a god. For a god is someone who moves, who feels, who remembers, who looks to the future, who rules over and guides and directs the body he is master of, just as that Supreme God directs the universe. And just as this eternal God controls the universe, which is partly mortal, so too your eternal spirit directs your fragile body.” It’s a pump-me-up that should have you ready to run through walls this morning. Sure, we are powerless over so much. We can be tossed around by the oceans, we can be struck down by disease, we’re not even as strong as a small chimpanzee. But over our own mind? There we have god-like powers. There, we are supreme masters. There we can direct and control the world like those mythical beings from Mt. Olympus. You’re a god. Know that. Now use that power wisely. Go do something that matters with it. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

27 Helmi 20202min

“Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams once said, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” How true it is. It’s an idea that goes to the very essence of what Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus spend so much time talking about.Reality is a stubborn thing. As much as we might want events to go or be one way, this has little bearing on the way they are. We wish we had been born tall, to a rich or royal family, we wish that special someone we fell head over heels in love with would return the feeling (or be the person we idealized them to be in our hearts) and yet, that is not how things are. We put in the work and yet, somehow, the person who was less talented won. We held our nose and voted for one candidate and, still, somehow the greater of two evils ended up winning. What do we do? It’s so unfair. It’s so frustrating. It’s just not right. Yet, yet, yet...In ex-Marine Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, a novel based on his experience fighting in the Vietnam War, the line, “There it is,” appears nearly thirty times, spoken by different characters. Your post Ivy League graduation plans were thwarted by a war? There it is. You have no experience leading a platoon of marines? There it is. You don’t get to sleep for two days because of an enemy invasion? There it is. Life is “There it is.” Stoicism is an acknowledgement of that fact, it’s a coping mechanism and a response to this fact. That’s what Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca were all talking about in their own way: How to make the most of a world to which most of what happens is not up to us and, in fact, seems to go contrary to how we would choose if it were. We can get angry and announce our disapproval. We can throw our hands up, curse the sky, and tell whoever will listen about how unfair this or that is. But as much as we argue, we can’t alter reality. So, we must embrace it. We must love it. All of it. Amor fati. “There it is.” And then do our best. And then make the most of it.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

26 Helmi 20203min

It’s no secret that John Adams is one of history’s brilliant minds. He was widely respected as a lawyer, a politician, a president, and as a husband, a father, and a friend. But for all this, he was often overwhelmed by anguish, despair, discontent, loneliness, doubt, fear, uncertainty, and the rest. “I can as easily still the fierce tempests or stop the rapid thunderbolt,” he once lamented in his journal, “as command the motions and operations of my own mind.” Like many of us, Adams longed for stillness, for “tranquility of mind,” vowing to one day “wear out of my mind every mean and base affection.” But it was a long time coming—indeed, it nearly came too late. In 1819, the year after the death of his treasured wife of fifty-four years, the devastated Adams turned to Cicero’s essay on growing old gracefully, De Senectute. It was an essay he had read “for seventy years, to the point of nearly knowing it by heart,” but somehow, now, in the quiet stillness, he found something new in it. As he wrote:I never delighted much in contemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measuring syllables; but now...if I attempt to look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way, among the nebulae, those mighty orbs, and stupendous orbits of suns, planets, satellites, and comets, which compose the incomprehensible universe.It was as if, now, having slowed down, having experienced so much, that he was seeing things differently. In short, he noticed what he had missed before—by reading and re-reading, he found something he had missed all those previous times. When Marcus Aurelius quoted Heraclitus—about how we can never step in the same river twice—this is what he was encouraging. We cannot content ourselves with first impressions or encounters, we must constantly revisit everything. Revisit the pages of books, revisit the sights we have overlooked, revisit the ordinary beauty of the world. It might take a lifetime for us to finally “get” it—but the stillness and the understanding will be worth it. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

25 Helmi 20203min

Steven Pressfield, whose historically-driven novels about ancient Greece have sold millions of copies, wrote a recent post that posits that there are two kinds of people in the world—Zero-Sum and Non-Zero-Sum. Hitler was zero-sum. He believed that the Aryan race could only survive if it took from and eliminated other races. Abraham Lincoln was non-zero-sum. Yes, he believed that slavery was a horrible evil and needed to end, but he did not believe that the North needed to crush and destroy the South. In fact, his famous Second Inaugural Address is all about how both sides shared the blame and both could be redeemed by the suffering they had endured in this horrible Civil War. Martin Luther King was non-zero-sum. So were the Spartans at Thermopylae, who sacrificed their lives just to buy a little more time for their Greek allies to prepare. Almost all villains in history and in fiction, on the other hand, are zero-sum. They believed that someone else’s loss was their gain—and that their own pain justified the infliction of pain on other people. Over and over again in the Stoic writings we see reminders intended to nudge us towards seeing the world as non-zero-sum. If you want to find some good, Marcus Aurelius writes, all you have to do is look inside yourself—it’s just there ready to bubble up. Wherever there is another person, Seneca writes, we have an opportunity for kindness. The best revenge, Marcus writes, is to not be like the people who have wronged you. What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee. What is the concept of sympatheia but a realization that harming other people does not benefit you? That you can’t steal your way to prosperity or harm your way to happiness? And yet, so much of what we do is selfish and zero-sum. That’s why we lie. Or cheat. Or vote for politicians who promise to aggressively fight for our own interests, even if it means that other people will suffer terribly. Pressfield’s beautiful article is a call to a higher standard to all of us. It’s worth quoting the final sentences of it here in full:In the non-zero-sum world, on the other hand, resources are infinite. The love a mother gives to her child (and that the child returns) grows greater, the more each loves. There is and can never be a shortage of love.Compassion is infinite.Integrity is infinite.Faith is infinite.Zero-sum versus non-zero-sum. Which point of view do you believe? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

24 Helmi 20203min