Stoicism

I’ve been working my way through Seneca’s “Letters from a Stoic”. It’s a slower go for me than “Meditations”. It’s a little more academic than “Meditations” with a good amount of discussion of abstract “virtue” and the like. The style in “Letters” isn’t as approachable as the personal dialog in “Meditations”. Now that I’m two-thirds of the way through, I’m starting to get into it more. I quite enjoyed Letter XCII On the Happy Life.

A Zen-like tidbit from Meditations today: Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one. Yep. I couldn’t agree more. It’s all related. That’s difficult to see when you are mired in the day to day.

On flipping through Meditations this morning, came across this: A rock thrown in the air. It loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up. That’s a very Zen quote. The rock is impervious to the state imposed on it from outside forces. Thinking about it from a lens of stoicism, we are (or should be) rocks. Ignore the forces outside of our control. Very existential. I wonder, does the rock get chipped by striking the ground?

A passage that caught my eye today while flipping through Meditations: Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.

I found this section to be useful today: Concentrate every minute like a Roman - like a man - on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can - if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

I recently read Meditations: A New Translation by Marcus Aurelius. It was really interesting and impactful. It’s a sort of diary written by a Roman emperor towards the end of his lifetime (A.D. 121-180) that is presented as a collection of books. The entries vary considerably in length and subject matter but it isn’t a recording of day to day activities but more about behavioral observations and thought experiments. I discovered it as a follow on to some readings about stoicism and found that it resonated with me.