A little Stoicism to help you through the wreckage
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I’ve been re-reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (in the fabulous translation by Gregory Hays), and a couple of passages jumped out at me that pertain to our MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT. (Gregory and I are Twitter neighbors.)
I find Marcus’s Stoicism to be, for the most part, an effective philosophy in maintaining a balance in your life. I part company with him over the pleasures of the senses — how can anyone eschew music or good food just because you might like it “too much”? — but on the whole the advice he gives is dead on:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own--not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.
Or, more pertinent to us Lichtenbergians:
Remember how long you've been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn't use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to, what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.
Ouch.
More positively, over in Book Eight, Marcus advises us on the whole ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS > GESTALT > SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION cycle:
32. You have to assemble your life yourself — action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can. No one can keep that from happening.
—But there are external obstacles.
Not to behaving with justice, self-control, and good sense.
—Well, but perhaps to some more concrete action.
But if you accept the obstacle and work with what you're give an alternative will present itself — another piece of what you're trying to assemble. Action by action.
He addresses ABANDONMENT:
—But how can I go on living with that undone?
Then depart, with a good conscience, as if you'd done it, embracing the obstacles too.
He even addresses AUDIENCE:
44. Give yourself a gift: the present moment.
People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. And just as mortal. What does it matter to you if they say x about you, or think y?
Indeed. Just do the work. Bit by bit, step by step, mistake by mistake. Don’t agonize over it, find a way forward, and don’t take any of it personally.
