How an ancient wisdom helped me piece together my fractured life.
Each night as I put my three-year-old son to bed we read our books, we sing our songs, and I tell myself that he may not survive to see the morning. When I revealed this to my mother the other night, she said it made her sick to her stomach. “How could you do that?” she asked. “How could youthink like that?” She sat on the couch in my living room, the light from the fire roaring in the fireplace danced across her face as she looked at me with earnest concern.
"It is more necessary to heal the soul than the body. For it is better to die than to live badly."—Epictetus.Aurelius is perhaps the most famous proponent of Stoicism, a Greco-Roman philosophy born from Zeno of Citium, who lived and taught in Athens circa 300 B.C. If Zeno was DJ Kool Herc, rap’s founder, then Aurelius, who lived some 450 years later, was Biggie Smalls—the man who turned it into something sublime.
After that, things really got bad. I began to have dark and cyclical thoughts that latched onto my consciousness, burning and raging there like psychic napalm. should be on every human’s reading list—put it most succinctly: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.” You could be doing something so banal as sitting in traffic, or getting stuck in a boring dinner conversation., a Stoic would say. Love your fate. This moment could not have ever possibly unfolded any other way than it has right now. And this moment is yours alone, so you must embrace it.
If any of these principles sound familiar to you, it’s because Stoic-influenced worldviews are enjoying a bit of a Renaissance. All the new wisdom is old wisdom. Journaling as part of a meditative practice is en vogue these days. Andcan be thought of as archetypal in this regard—Aurelius wrote it for himself, with no intention of publication.
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