Alexandersmap

    Category: Stoicism

    • Be Merciless With Time

      “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

      We are the authors of our own souls, yet most of us squander our agency and slide into compliance with expectations and deferment of dreams. What a shame. We ring in our celebration of adulthood with jobs, mortgages and parenthood. These are surely worthy pursuits (otherwise why would we do them?), but isn’t it fair to ask, what are we punting down the path in our quest to measure up?

      To be fair, we weren’t born ready to leap across the chasm. We’re never ready, really, but it didn’t feel right to risk everything, such that it was at the time, for the unknown. But every one of us is in the process of becoming whatever we’ll be next, not sitting still, and what we weren’t ready for yesterday might be just the ticket today or tomorrow. We aren’t what we were in all of our previous days, we’re the sum of it.

      So given that, shouldn’t we write a script that inspires, makes us well up a bit with emotion and make the hairs on the back of our neck stand up in nervous excitement just for the shear possibility of realizing what we’ve schemed up? I should think so. We’re all actors in our own play, why do we spend so much of it reading lines written by another?

      We mustn’t bend or dilute our future. We must be merciless — for it’s ours alone, and soon it will fall away like all of our days before. Isn’t it better to realize our greatest obsessions than to squander them in the swirl of trivial pursuits?

    • Stacking the Positives

      “We are the sum total of our experiences. Those experiences – be they positive or negative – make us the person we are, at any given point in our lives. And, like a flowing river, those same experiences, and those yet to come, continue to influence and reshape the person we are, and the person we become. None of us are the same as we were yesterday, nor will be tomorrow.“ — B.J. Neblett

      On a beautifully still morning I watched the fish in the bay react as a seal hunted for its breakfast. Perfect stillness broken by panicked splashes. The seal must eat and the fish must leap to survive. The story evolves around me, yet I have no meaningful role in it but to bear witness.

      There’s no denying the last few years brought plenty of negative experiences, and each shaped us in ways we might eagerly trade for an alternative outcome. But life isn’t gingerly holding our hand for this ride, it grudgingly allows us a seat on this train. The rest is up to us as the hits and highs come at us. What we make of our lives depends on how the sum of our experiences shapes us.

      The stakes aren’t always so dire, but in life we’re either breakfast or having breakfast. Our story will play out one way or the other, and based on how we react, in subsequent choices made in the balance of our days. We must fight for what we believe in yet accept what we can’t control.

    • Greeted With Joy

      “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.” — Henry David Thoreau

      I frequently tout the value of each day, going to great lengths to remind myself and anyone who’ll listen to seize it—Carpe diem!. Memento mori! It’s a system for being forever in the moment, maximizing each day as best you can as life throws its curveballs. And it immediately sorts obligations and opportunities into appropriate buckets.

      I’m not always sympathetic when others value perceived obligations over the opportunity to amplify living, but I’ve learned to accept that it isn’t my life but theirs. Still, the question remains, as we begin another day, what will we make of it? We ought to do our best to make it successful, whatever that means to you.

    • Walk the Walk

      “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” – Epictetus

      To make giant leaps forward in our careers, athletically, intellectually… whatever, is a worthy aspiration. But should it be a goal? Shouldn’t we focus on consistently taking action towards who we want to be, instead of focusing on the end game? If you want to be a great photographer or writer or 400 meter hurdler, then chip away at meaningful activity that moves you incrementally towards realizing that dream. Talk is BS, it’s only the walk that matters.

      Shane Parrish recently wrote about Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, who touched on this topic. Adams favors systems over goals because it reinforces success every time you do what you said you were going to do. A goal usually ends up frustrating and discouraging us while a system rewards us constantly:

      “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.” — Scott Adams, as quoted by Shane Parrish in his blog

      I don’t agree with Adams on a lot of things, but I definitely see the truth in this statement. We can’t possibly feel successful if a goal is always out of reach, but we can feel good about our last workout or clicking publish one more day. We all should live by our personal credo. But it isn’t what we say that defines our lives, it’s what we do that exemplifies how delusional or on point that credo is. So walk the walk.

    • To Be Alive

      “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” — Marcus Aurelius

      I saw the squirrel, hanging upside down in the sun, grasping the oak bark with its cleverly-designed hind claws that hinge and hook so miraculously. He was staring intently at me, wondering what my intent was. Ready to flee, preferring to hang in the sun nibbling on whatever delights he came across. “Don’t worry about me friend,” I offered. “My intent is to celebrate the day, as you clearly are.”

      We aren’t born with the tools to hang upside down halfway up oak trees, or to soar on a whim to see the sunrise from high above the valley floor. We aren’t born able to dive deep into the sea to see how far the sunbeams penetrate the salty depths. Yet someone engineered ways for us to do each of these things, should we be so inclined. We don’t celebrate the collective contribution of humanity nearly enough, perhaps because we focus so much on our failings.

      To be alive is an immeasurable gift, extraordinary in scope yet tragically brief in duration. What exactly are we doing with each day to celebrate this gift? To flip that question upside down like that squirrel in the tree, what are we postponing in our lives that rejects the gift of this day? Isn’t that the ultimate rejection that betrays our potential? For, no matter what we might tell ourselves, we may not have another.

      Maybe this is why I love mornings so much—they offer proof that we’ve been given the opportunity to be alive for at least one more day, and with it a fresh beginning. We each have the opportunity to engineer our lives from this moment to our last. To toss our limitations aside and find a way to soar.

    • The Very Best Day of All

      “Let us therefore set out whole-heartedly, leaving aside our many distractions and exert ourselves in this single purpose, before we realize too late the swift and unstoppable flight of time and are left behind. As each day arises, welcome it as the very best day of all, and make it your own possession. We must seize what flees.” — Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius

      It must be Spring, for I return again to Seneca’s urgent call: “Seize what flees”. And so it is our quest to live this day as if it were our very last. To meet this, our moment at hand, and do something with it.

      That’s a heavy ask. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform with statements like that. We all want to seize the day, but what if we’ve got bills to pay and a car that doesn’t drive itself to work quite yet? Who’s going to clean the dishes while we’re off seizing the day?

      Seneca had his own daily obligations and understood the recklessness of grabbing the moment. Does it carry more weight when you think of him as mere dust mixed in the timeless sands of Rome? He knew the stakes, but also knew we all have things to do. Just don’t make it your life’s purpose to fulfill the dreams of others. Make a stand for your own dreams today too.

      Welcome today as the very best day of all. It’s all we have, really. What would make it particularly remarkable given the chorus of requests for our time? Let’s carve out a little of our brief time to seize that. Deal?

    • Struggle Informs

      “Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.” — Flannery O’Connor

      This is the most vivid description of ego as our enemy that I’ve come across. Whatever your feelings on God, put that aside for a moment and recognize the prayer for what it is—a cry to get out of our own way to do what we know we’re here to do. For there’s nothing more universal than the internal struggle of ego casting a shadow on our true mission.

      Struggle informs. It teaches us where our gaps are. Gaps in knowledge or skill or physical strength. Learning where our gaps are offers us an opportunity to bridge it with effort and help. Alternatively, we might turn from the gap thinking it a chasm we cannot cross. We all make choices on what we might grow into and what we let die. When that dying is a piece of us it feels a bit more personal, doesn’t it?

      And yet we must choose to move forward in our lives. We must decide what to be and go be it. That may sound smug and simplistic on the surface, especially when we so clearly see the gaps and view it as a chasm. But the ask isn’t to take a flying leap, but to begin closing that gap, one step at a time. To gently push ourselves out of the way, just a little, to see what we might become over time, should we take another step after this one.

      What casts a greater shadow over our potential than our own ego? We must learn to get out of our own way. For there’s so much more beyond our current position. Can’t you just see it?

    • Here in My Mold

      ‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, that’s life
      Tryna make ends meet
      You’re a slave to money then you die
      I’ll take you down the only road I’ve ever been down
      You know the one that takes you to the places
      Where all the veins meet yeah
      No change, I can change
      I can change, I can change
      But I’m here in my mold
      I am here in my mold
      But I’m a million different people
      From one day to the next
      I can’t change my mold
      No, no, no, no, no
      Have you ever been down?
      — The Verve, Bitter Sweet Symphony

      Do you hear Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” quote in your head reading the lyrics of Bitter Sweet Symphony? This song exploded in the mid-1990’s, becoming a theme song of sorts for Generation X and maybe some of those who followed. How do the lyrics hold up, almost three decades later? I think it depends on how well you’ve broken free of your mold.

      Breaking free of that mold you’ve been cast in and following your heart is reckless. The very idea of breaking free disrupts all you’ve built around you. For what is a mold but that? Our very place in this world is determined by where we place ourselves. Life is change and moving beyond our old self. We must grow and see where the road takes us. Where our heart takes us.

      Watching people you care about quickly turn from vibrantly alive to quickly sliding into the next triggers an urgency to break molds. To do the things you’ve been putting off and live today. This is what the stoics have been telling us all along. Memento Mori. Carpe Diem.

      Get after it already. Follow the road where all your veins meet. We can all change.

    • Holding the Love I’ve Known

      When my body won’t hold me anymore
      And it finally lets me free
      Where will I go?
      Will the trade winds take me south through Georgia grain?
      Or tropical rain?
      Or snow from the heavens?
      Will I join with the ocean blue?
      Or run into a savior true?
      And shake hands laughing
      And walk through the night, straight to the light
      Holding the love I’ve known in my life
      And no hard feelings
      — The Avett Brothers, No Hard Feelings

      I’m watching four people in my family waste away before my eyes. We all have our time, but it still comes as a shock when that time is in such close proximity to now. When you’re the one holding it together for them and others you learn a few things about yourself. Mostly you learn to stop deferring and just say and do the things that need saying and doing.

      I’ve noticed some doubt and regret overwhelm those facing rapidly receding time on this earth. Life is unfair, we all see that and reconcile with it as best we can, but it’s particularly unfair for those who have the rug pulled out from under them in the prime of life. You mean to have that conversation, experience that moment, see that place for the first time or maybe for one last time, and realize that you’ll never reach it.

      What are we to do, knowing we haven’t done all we want to do, but celebrate what we did have the chance to do? To hold on to the love we have known? For that’s all that matters in the end. We make the ripple we make, and hope that the world might feel the urge to surf it. Life isn’t the accumulation of stuff or places or rungs on the career ladder, it’s the people you love in this world.

      We all have our time, sometimes far sooner than we ever imagined. We either hold a grudge with the universe or dance in the time we have left. No hard feelings—only love.

    • Playing At the Edges of Knowing

      I believe I will never quite know.
      Though I play at the edges of knowing,
      truly I know
      our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving,
      which is the way I walked on,
      softly,
      through the pale-pink morning light.
      — Mary Oliver, Bone

      Like the beach Mary Oliver walked in this poem, life ebbs and flows. We either surf the rip or get pulled under by it. This latest period of chaos could overwhelm us or strengthen our resolve to persevere in the face of it.

      We never quite know all that we seek to understand. Just when we think we’ve got it figured out the world throws another curveball at you. Coming out of a pandemic, thinking that things will finally get better and… they don’t. Not yet anyway. You know that this too shall pass, somehow. But life asks us to wait just a bit longer still. Or life tells you that your time has come, sooner than you expected it to. Just when you thought you’d arrived.

      Our part is not meant to be easy. Our part is not knowing, but staying with it anyway. Our part is to support one another in the face of uncertainty.

      Amor Fati, or “love of fate”, is the stoic’s answer to these times. Amor is not quite right. We don’t have to love our fate. But accepting it frees us to focus on the moments we have together. While there’s still time.