Alexandersmap

    Category: Stoicism

    • Shaking the Perception of Sameness

      “You start earning a million dollars, and you get all the stuff that comes with it. On week one, when you get a nice house with a nice shower, and a nice car, that feels good. But by week two or three, that’s just your shower. That’s just your car. It’s just your house. You’ve stopped noticing all the great things about it. This is a bad feature of human psychology for all the fantastic things in life. Even the best things in life, we will wind up getting used to.” — Laurie Santos, The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish: #139 Laurie Santos

      What do we get used to? We relish that first cup of coffee in the morning, but by the second we’re simply maintaining our energy, akin to filling up the tank in our cars. There’s magic in the ritual of making and savoring that first cup, isn’t there? So why does the novelty wear off so quickly on subsequent cups?

      Now take out the coffee analogy and insert any other thing that we begin to take for granted in our lives. The place we live, the car we drive, the people we hold most dear. At what point does routine dull our appreciation for the things we cherish the most in our lives? And more importantly, how do we break ourselves of this mindset?

      That’s what the Stoics were pushing themselves towards when they reminded themselves that the entire game is temporary. Memento mori, Carpe diem, Amor Fati… not just clever Latin phrases to throw around at parties, but a way of living with awareness. A way to focus on the now and appreciate where we are. Stuff is temporary, people come and go from our lives, good fortune can turn bad and back again in an instant, and through it all each moment remains a blessing.

      We humans get caught up in our annoyances, setbacks and frustrations du jour, but perhaps the worst thing that can ever happen to us is to simply getting used to living the way we do. Same job, same friends and family, same lunch… there’s just no savoring when we’re focused on sameness. Like salt sprinkled over an otherwise bland meal, a good shake of Stoicism offers us the opportunity to savor. For this is our big night out, and we ought to celebrate it for the special occasion it is.

    • Our Present Sphere

      “All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.” — Margaret Fuller

      Today we bury a part of the family, completing his journey back to the earth. Back to the eternal. Our time together was relatively short, as lifetimes go, but memorable. We all live on in memories, they say. My experience with such things makes me believe it to be so.

      Memories are borne out of moments. Moments in turn from living with full awareness of our present sphere. Will we ever master the moment? Probably not, but as a sommelier trains their taste buds to discern the nuances of a wine, we might train our minds for nuance too. And in doing so, savor life more each day.

      The thing we generally say when someone passes is, “rest in peace”. But their passing is a message to us too: Memento mori — remember, we all must die. So pay your respects, hug one another and go out and live while there’s still time.

    • In Favor of Wonder

      “Sadly it is not only the force of gravity we get used to as we grow up. The world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central—something philosophers try to restore. For somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought.” — Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy

      Gaarder’s premise is sound: We come into the world full of wonder, but as we grow up being alive becomes a habit. We reach a point where we think we’ve seen it all before and grow comfortable with the general act of our daily existence. Each day remains a miracle, but the vast majority of people take it for granted. What a pity.

      I’ve been working to break this habit in myself for years through deep immersion in philosophy, poetry, history, travel and the deliberate process of savoring the moment. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I slip into the routine of the day-to-day. But every day I try to begin with reflection on this miracle of being alive. The blog forces me to stay in this lane, if only for a short while, before work and responsibilities draw my attention elsewhere. But I always strive to return to wonder.

      What if instead of returning to wonder we found a way to stay on the dance floor with it? Not in some stupor or drug-induced high, but through deliberate focus on each moment. Turning the habit of living day-to-day on its head and instead embracing heightened awareness and the quiet delight available to us in each encounter along the way. Isn’t that taking the act of living to a higher level?

      We all want more wonder and delight in our lives, for it’s the frosting on our cake—our exclamation point on our moments. The thing is, to break the old habit of merely living, we’ve got to favor wonder and make it a regular part of us. Like any habit, it becomes a part of our identity through consistency. That’s putting the wonder in a full life.

    • A Lifetime of Closing Doors

      Death twitches my ear.
      “Live’” He says, “I am coming.“
      — Virgil

      The twitch is there, reminding me to make the most of each day. You may have noticed a lean towards Stoicism early on in this blog. Stoicism celebrates every moment of life, because we remind ourselves that infinity is calling. So decide what to be and go be it. To be or not to be, that is the question that Hamlet forever ponders. And so must we.

      My favorite barista retired. I walked in to chat, er, to get a coffee made just so, and she hasn’t been there. Then again, I haven’t been there, traveling and such, but back again and eager for the banter of familiarity. After a couple of tries, I asked a new barista where Sue was, only to find out she’d simply…. retired. Moved on to try new things with her brief dance with light. And I was momentarily floored by the abruptness of it all. It’s not life and death, not yet for either party, but it was one more door closing in a lifetime of closing doors.

      I have a cat that meows incessantly if there’s a door closed that she wants to be on the other side of. Pick her up, give her a treat, try to ignore her at your peril: nothing resolves the meowing but an open door. We all have this curiosity, perhaps expressed less annoyingly (perhaps), to know what’s on the other side of the door. We aren’t in a rush to find out, but we’ll find out one day. And knowing that, we must accept that the door is closed for a reason. It’s not our time to dance with infinity, it’s our time to dance with light. So dance, friend.

    • What Escapes Us

      “Our life is also what we have not dared to do … what escaped us.” — Javier Marias

      Javier Marias passed away on September 11th, triggering a series of tributes to a productive literary life. This quote stood out for me, for all the reasons you might expect from this particular blogger. If there’s a theme woven throughout, it’s Stoic: Memento Mori, Amor Fati, Carpe diem.

      Life is a series of leaps forward from one identity to the next as we cross the chasm of our brief time, yet some bits of our stardust are never fully changed, other paths remain untaken. And we think sometimes about where it might have carried us. What might have been.

      Does that read as regret? It’s not meant to be so. Life is full of choices good and poor. We celebrate where we’ve arrived at either way. Regret is a useless emotion best reserved for the instant you realize you’ve driven off the cliff or studied the wrong material for the exam. Otherwise it’s distraction from the path forward. We all ought to accept the guidance of previous decisions without living in the past.

      We know what we said yes to, because it brought us here. We must also accept what we say no to in our lives. We ought to celebrate the omissions for where they brought us. For these things are as much a part of who we become as the things we do choose. Every no is a yes to something else. Each decision carries us, transforms us, and we dance with the music we’re left with. Mostly it’s a real toe tapper.

      Do remember though, as we dance with where we’ve arrived at, that daring is always on the table.

    • Weaving a More Effective Life

      “Habit is a rope. We weave a thread every day, and eventually we can’t break it.” — Thomas Mann

      “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle

      This business of repeatedly doing is leading somewhere, with our destination highly dependent on what we repeatedly do. Such is the way. Mann’s observation rings true as well, for habits become nearly impossible to break once established. Each small choice is another thread—another resounding, audacious statement about who we want to be.

      Our natural inclination is to be a part of something. To build an identity around community or family. This can reinforce positive behavior, or amplify the worst in us. The choice isn’t always ours to decide which pond to swim in, but we may choose whether to keep treading above the surface or drift down into the muck on the bottom.

      When our identity is wrapped up in a community that is slowly drifting away, as people get older or recede from view towards other communities, we also choose how to react to that. People come and go. Our health and work and feelings about the world we live in change moment-to-moment. To be highly effective in life we ought to weave a thread of consistent activity that remains independent of the whims of fate. When the world unravels around us, and eventually it will feel that way for all of us, just how resilient are we?

      “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”— Viktor Frankl

      Life is constantly testing our mettle. We control so very little in the big scheme of things. Frankl’s famous observation reminds us that we do get to choose how we react. We have a say in what we might become in our brief dance with the universe in all its harsh indifference. We still might decide what to be and go be it.

    • Days to Come

      “Days to come stand in front of us
      like a row of lighted candles—
      golden, warm, and vivid candles.
      Days gone by fall behind us,
      a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles;
      the nearest are smoking still,
      cold, melted, and bent.”
      — C. P. Cavafy

      When you think about it, our days gone by are a stack of previous lives, somewhat resembling us today. Yet we must seek the vivid and alive, embrace our days to come, especially this one, at the expense of what we once were. For there’s no growth in dwelling on the past—we must stand ourselves on top of who we once were, we aren’t built to linger there.

      What’s done is done, what lies ahead is all that matters now. Past accomplishments and failures, all the good and bad, are like books we once read that form us in sometimes notable, and often insignificant ways. There’s no telling in the moment you pick it up for the first time what it will mean to you until you give it your attention in the moment. Such are our days—notable and insignificant, but all adding up to this.

      Days to come offer hope for a better future. It’s our time together, formed today, and nurtured in however many more we might have. Like the past, we’ll face new highs and lows, savor wins and absorb losses. Each are inevitable. All we can do is give each our singular attention and an honest attempt to make the most of the line, however long it might be.

    • August Signals

      Black-eyed Susan’s once again dominate, staking a claim on more of the garden every year if you let them. I mostly let them. They remind me of conversations with a favorite gardener who’s moved on, which means they’ll forever receive favorable treatment in my garden.

      Crickets receive no such favorable treatment, but we peacefully coexist nonetheless. They play the soundtrack of August. Most of the year we hardly give crickets a thought, until they begin playing their persistent song from mid-summer to mid-autumn. Thousands of musicians announcing “We’re here, if only so very briefly.” Is there anything more stoic than a cricket?

      The gardener senses the seasons. No calendar is required. The days grow shorter even as the heat continues. For these are the dog days of August, marked by black-eyed Susan’s dancing to the persistent tune of an orchestra of crickets.

    • Write to Clarity

      “You want to become a clearer thinker, you need to spend more time alone with your own thoughts, and keep writing every day.” — @Orangebook

      How do we reach clarity? Don’t we have to wrestle with conflicting thoughts to see which emerges more persuasive than the rest? The vehicle to clarity might be walking or meditation or therapy or writing, but the wrestling within that vehicle must happen. The alternative is to reach for distraction. We all have moments with each, but which way do the scales tip?

      Maybe we never reach clarity at all, maybe we reach contentment with the great compromise of the clear and the unknown. The stoics have a saying, amor fati, which translates to love of fate. We control very little in this universe, the rest belongs to the universe to decide. Accepting what we can control is certainly a milestone moment on our journey to clarity.

      The thing is, the process of sorting out the journey is what life is. We might think more clearly, but this step in becoming brings us into a more complex head full of doubt, which, transcended, in turn leads to another. We ought to celebrate the journey to clarity, without expecting to actually arrive.

    • Meaning Abides

      “Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.” — Henry David Thoreau

      “If you want to be happy, be.” – Leo Tolstoy

      “Happiness is transient, but meaning abides.” — James Hollis

      We are all in the process of becoming whatever it is we’ll evolve into next. Blogging documents much of my own becoming, along with a few reckless photos of myself that others insist on releasing into the wild. When you document everything, the documenter captures while seemingly avoiding capture. This is a fools game, everything documented speaks, if we listen and observe closely enough. The trick is to listen closely enough to ourselves.

      The three quotes above naturally clung to each other in the course of a few weeks of reading and writing and sorting out life as it comes to you. We must consider the way in which we spend our lives, for the routines and habits offer a path to meaning and, dare we say, happiness. We are what we repeatedly do, as Aristotle reminds us (For those keeping score that’s four quotes in one relatively brief blog post—just what has gotten into this writer??).

      Perspective, of course. And an inclination to write whatever damned way suits the moment, I suppose. But don’t let me stray too far off the point here. The point is, we must spend our days chipping away at the marble to reveal the secret masterpiece hidden within each of us. Like so many of those unfinished masterpieces you see in museums, we too may run out of time. No, that’s not right—we will certainly run out of time. But we must attempt to draw as much of ourselves out of that cold marble as we possible can before we reach the end of our runway and crash into the abyss.

      We must attempt that which speaks to us. Becoming means to come to a place—what will that place be? Let it be meaningful.