AS WE ought, however, to be prepared in some manner for this also, to be self-sufficient and able to bear our own company. For as Jupiter converses with himself, acquiesces in himself, and contemplates his own administration, and is employed in thoughts worthy of himself: so should we too be able to talk with ourselves, and not to need the conversation of others, nor be at a loss for employment; to attend to the divine administration ; to consider our relation to other beings; how we have formerly been affected by events, how we are affected now; what are the things that still press upon us, how these too may be cured, how removed; if anything wants completing, to complete it according to reason.
EPICTETUS. DISCOURSES. Book iii. §13. ¶1
This is a wonderful goal to reach towards, but it isn't always as easy as writting in your journal at night. Sometimes our body betrays us, sometimes our concience does.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part of Stoicism is the insistence on using the rational faculty to make sense of life. Too often, folks respond emotionally to events and then regret what they've done or said. Living life according to nature and reason would mean a life of far less regret and emotional disturbance. I, for one, even though I'm not successful all the time, will continue to reach for that idea.
ReplyDeleteProductivity is a lost art in our society. Countless hours are wasted in mindless pursuits, worshiping the latest tv star, etc.
ReplyDeleteI am going to attempt to be more productive in my life. Gardening, sewing, reading while listening to music, playing the piano, singing, etc. More activities and far less leisure. We need balance of activity and leisure and the scale is tipping to far on leisure for me at the moment.
We have filled our lives with distraction and destruction. We are entertained and trained along the same paths and plays and myths that occupy our minds and our hands while the world beyond our attention is drained of life and we forget that we are them, we are nature. We have lost our mother, our father, our siblings, and we have chosen to sacrifice our children on the Baal-fire of our own comfort and convenience instead of attending and befriending them, we are ending their future in favour of our mindless, shiftless, soulless present, to pay for our past hunger and our future greed.
ReplyDeleteI'm hearing Emerson today so I'll let him speak for me:
ReplyDelete"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost...
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till...
This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents."