What You Think You’re Lacking Is The Problem

1981 was a tough year for tennis great Billie Jean King. That year, she sat down to write her memoir having endured serious betrayal on multiple fronts. One was emotional and financial: a woman she’d had an affair with attempted to extort her, creating a massive scandal. The other was physical and inevitable: Her body had begun to betray her mastery of the game. She was getting older, the other players were getting younger. She had to confront the fact that most of her winning was behind her. Yet, she would close her memoir with a pretty remarkable series of sentences that capture one of the most important (but most difficult) concepts in Stoicism: Amor Fati. But more important now, I must think in terms of very specific goals and realities. Of course, I can just say I want to win all three -- the singles, doubles, and mixed. Easy to say and easy to want, but so difficult to execute. How can I do it? More than anything else, I must love everything that is part and parcel of the total Wimbledon scene. I must love hitting that little white ball; love every strain of running and bending those tired knees; love every bead of sweat; love every cloud or every ray of sun in the sky; love every moment of tension, waiting in the locker room; love the lack of total rest every night, the hunger pains during the day, taking a bath in my favorite tub, buying lollies for the ball boys, looking at the ivy and the trees and the flower arrangements, driving through Roehampton on the way to the courts every morning, practicing on the outside court with your stomach in your throat before the match; love watching people queue, knowing some of them have waited twenty years to experience one day at the Wimbledon; love playing on the Fourth of July, talking with Mrs. Twyman, having a rubdown, hearing the women talk (or not talk), and feeling the tension in the air, running up to the tea room through the crowds; love feeling and absorbing the tradition of almost one hundred years. In essence, I have to possess enough passion and love to withstand all the odds. No matter how tough, no matter what kind of outside pressure, no matter how many bad breaks along the way, I must keep my sights on the final goal, to win, win, win -- and with more love and passion than the world has ever witnessed in any performance. A total, giving performance: give more when you think you have nothing left. Through the desire the inspiration will be present. Love, passion, attitude, ability, intensity -- the only way, a street with no curves or cul-de-sacs. I must let my inner self be out front and free. Love always. What’s particularly striking about this passage are King’s observations about the mundane difficulties of the life of a tennis player and the way she was able to capture and appreciate--much the way Marcus Aurelius could--the ordinary pieces of experience. The beads of sweat...the moments of tension...the treats for the ball boys...even the pain of playing -- these are the things we see in a different light when we choose Amor Fati. In Marcus’s time he wrote about stalks of grain bending low, about the flecks of foam on a boar’s mouth, ripe fruit, the chattering of the adoring (and not adoring) crowds, the yapping of small dogs. When we accept and embrace everything that is around us, we can truly begin to see it. We can see everything, big and small, good and bad, and find beauty in it--find something to love in it. We can find the intensity aSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

9 Okt 20184min

Death and dying are the worst parts of life, right? After all, they do end the whole thing. So while it does make sense, generally, to try to avoid dying, Seneca marvelled at the terrible things people do to stay alive--things much worse than death. We’ll betray friends, he said, betray our most closely held beliefs, people will even sell out their own children and grandchildren--as the elderly often do in almost every election--just to keep things the way we like them. How pathetic is this? And what a contradiction it is. Sure, you’re literally still alive, but you traded your soul to make it so. You might as well be in a coma on a ventilator. Actually, according to Seneca, that would be better. Because the problem with the pathetic, unprincipled, selfish things we do to stay alive--stealing, hoarding, lying, and cheating--is that we then have to live with them. People do terrible things to live to see the sunrise the next day, he says, “a dawn that’s privy to their many sins.” There are many worse things than death, many things that no amount of years are worth trading for. That is: Living with what we had to do to keep living, well, that can be worth than death. We must always remember that. Life is not the scarce resource, living well is. Being a good person is. Doing the right thing is. That’s what important. Not how many years you pile up. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

8 Okt 20182min

We put a lot of thought into making distinctions about what’s urgent and what’s not. We put a lot of effort into planning. We have our conservative calculations for retirement and our ambitious ones. We have a bucket list that includes the things we want to do now, in the future and in the way way off distant future. All of which presumes we’ve got plenty of time with which to do it all. The thought exercise from Marcus Aurelius: “Suppose that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow “or the day after.” Unless you were a complete coward you wouldn’t kick up a fuss about which day it was--what difference could it make? Now recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.” We live under precisely the kind of sentence that Marcus described. We could go today. We could go tomorrow. This week or next week. In twenty minutes or twenty years. These are, in the big scheme of things, infinitely small amounts of time. You get that, right? So why are you living as if you have forever? Why are you wasting so much time? Don’t be a coward. Don’t split hairs. Live your life. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

5 Okt 20182min

In Game of Thrones, the people of the Iron Islands believe they have been entitled by God to steal and seize whatever they like. Women, land, possessions, even the rightful kingdom of one’s own brother--all of this is capriciously taken by the ironborn if they think they’d like to have it. "I take what is mine. I pay the iron price,” Balon Greyjoy says. It’s a tradition that the Roman empire, even at its most aggressive and belligerent, never fully embraced. Yet there is something or someone who actually does lives by the iron law and always has: Fortune. Which is why Seneca and Marcus and every Stoic lived with profound respect for her power and dominance. It doesn’t matter who you are, how rich you are, how big your army is, how pious you have been in your life. Fortune can and will come take it from you. The pages of Seneca’s writings are not only filled with stories of powerful people who were attacked by Fortune paying the iron price for their most prized possessions; his own life follows the same storyline. He was exiled, he lost loved ones, his reputation was destroyed, and in the end, his breath itself was taken without recompense. Epictetus too had his freedom taken this way, even partly giving up his ability to walk to a slave owner who paid nothing in return for this deprivation. We measly humans are not mythical characters in Game of Thrones, but we are nonetheless subjected to those wicked economics. We are what’s paid. Never forget this. Never forget, as Seneca said and needed to remember himself, Fortune’s habit of doing what she pleases, acting as capriciously as she wishes, and how little she cares for our feelings in regards to it. Because it will happen. Oh and, now and forever, it’s important to remember: Premeditatio Malorum See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

4 Okt 20183min

It’s interesting, if you think about Greek and Roman mythology, that the Gods were so active and busy. Athena and Circe and Hermes all worked to help Odysseus. Apollo guided Achilles. Zeus and Jupiter were always getting involved in this squabble or that one. Sort of weird, right? They were Gods, they could do anything...or nothing...and yet they still worked really hard to keep the universe in balance or to see this cause or that one triumph. There is a similar theme in the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna appears to Arjuna and tries to convince him of his destiny to fight in the Kurukshetra War. In one verse, he says, “I have no work to do in all the worlds, Arjuna, for these are mine. I have nothing to obtain, because I have it all. And yet I work...” It could be said that the same theme emerges in the lives of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Cato, despite their status as lesser mortals. Marcus Aurelius was emperor and he could have just as easily spent his reign on an island retreat like his predecessor Tiberius. Seneca came from a wealthy family and could have spent his time on one of the family estates. Cato could have been a playboy or a bookish philosopher. Yet all these men chose the active life instead. They chose to participate in public affairs. They risked their lives. They were not content to coast on their reputations or past accomplishments. They held themselves to high standards. They didn’t have to. But they did anyway. And so must we--no matter how successful we get, nor how much easier it would be to rest on our laurels. Even when we have everything, even when we achieve wisdom and perspective about how silly and unimportant most worldly matters are, nothing exempts us from hard work. Nothing gives us a pass on our duty. We just keep going. That’s the job of being a good person just as it’s the duty of a god. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

3 Okt 20182min

The anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun and the song it inspired, One by Metallica, tell the story of Joe Bonham, a soldier who has been grievously injured on the battlefield in World War I. Upon waking in the hospital, the soldier finds that he cannot walk or speak, see or hear. Modern science has saved his body—or at least part of it—and he is left questioning what kind of life this actually is. There is the haunting lyric in Metallica’s epic song: “Landmine has taken my sight Taken my speech Taken my hearing Taken my arms Taken my legs Taken my soul Left me with life in hell” Certainly one would not want to be flip about the unreal torture that would have been Joe’s position—a position that far too many soldiers have found themselves in. However, the Stoics would have pushed back on the second to last line—taken my soul. Because to the Stoics, nothing, not even the explosion of a landmine, can touch what is inside us. And in fact, the plot of the novel and the song are evidence of this. Despite the terror and pain of his ghastly position—trapped in his own body, unable to move, alive only in the most technical sense of the word—Johnny shows a remarkable amount of control over his own life. Remembering that he knows Morse Code, he begins to communicate with his doctors by tapping his head. First, telling them SOS, SOS, SOS until eventually they understand. Then, finally, he asks the military to exhibit him across the country, in a glass box, as evidence of the horrors of war. This is not a man whose soul has been taken. This is a man who has been deprived of everything but his soul and it is that soul that he is leaning on in this moment of unimaginable suffering and difficulty. Our soul is the only untouchable thing within us. No arms, no legs, no eyes, no face, and Jonny retains the ability to determine his own fate, to decide the terms he is going to live or not to live on. And we do possess this power and fortitude, which we can apply in any and all situations we face today...ones that if Fortune holds will be far less ethically fraught and painful than those that real soldiers face in the intensive care units every day. Oh and, now and ever, it’s important to remember: Memento Mori. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

2 Okt 20183min

One of the best passages in all of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is the opener to Book V. In it, Marcus has a dialog with himself as he struggles to get out of bed in the morning. It’s just marvelously relatable. Here we have an extraordinary man, some twenty centuries ago, struggling just like every ordinary man and woman has, to get up the willpower to get up from his warm bed and get to work. Who hasn’t had a similar conversation with themselves? Who hasn’t thought, just as Marcus did, that “it’s nicer here” under the covers? As Dante wrote in his Divine Comedy, “beneath the blanket is no way to fame.” Not that Marcus or the Stoics would have advocated chasing fame. Still, Marcus did get out of bed that morning and every other morning. Why? Because he had to. He had a job to do. We all do. Ordinary and extraordinary alike, we weren’t put on this planet and evolution didn’t mercilessly improve and refine our species to do nothing. No, we have skills to deploy and duties to fulfill. We have things to do. It’s time to get up and do them. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

1 Okt 20181min