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“It’s the activity that gets you out of bed, not the alarm clock.”
“Duty” not “obligation.” There is a difference. Duty comes from inside, obligation from outside. When we act out of a sense of duty, we do so voluntarily to lift ourselves, and others, higher. When we act out of obligation, we do so to shield ourselves, and only ourselves, from repercussions.
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being.’ ” Not as a Stoic or an emperor, or even as a Roman, but as a human being.
For Socrates, none of these qualified as serious questions. A serious question steps into uncharted waters. A serious question carries risk, like striking a match in a dark room. You don’t know what you’ll find when the room illuminates—monsters or miracles—but you strike the match anyway. That’s why serious questions are uttered not confidently but clumsily, hesitantly, with all the gangly awkwardness of a teenager.
Socrates annoyed others for a good cause: better vision. Socrates as optometrist. People walk around with faulty eyeglass prescriptions. Naturally, this lapse affects how they see, and what they see. They have mistaken their distorted view of reality as the only view. Worse, they don’t even know they’re wearing glasses.
it is the philosopher-emperor Marcus who answers. Respond to adversity, real or imagined, not with self-pity or hand-wringing, but simply by starting over. Viewed this way, life no longer feels like a narrative gone awry, or a botched ending. None of that is real. There are no endings. Only an infinite chain of beginnings.
We walk to forget. We walk to forget the cranky boss, the spat with the spouse, the pile of unpaid bills, the flashing warning light in your Subaru, indicating either that the tire pressure is low or the car is on fire.
Like Socrates, Thoreau believed all philosophy begins with wonder. He expresses this idea many times, in many ways, but my favorite is this simple line from Walden: “Reality is fabulous.”
The person attuned to beauty will find it in a garbage dump while “the fault-finder will find fault even in paradise.”
We’re like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys in a lighted alleyway. “Did you lose them here?” asks a passerby. “No. I lost them over there,” he says, pointing to a dark parking lot. “Then why are you looking here?” “This is where the light is.” Not Schopenhauer. He searched where it is darkest.
Life was communal, with little privacy. “Let nothing be done in your life, which will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbor,” said Epicurus.
Epicureanism is a philosophy of acceptance, and its close cousin, gratitude. When we accept something, truly accept it, we can’t help but feel gratitude.
How much is enough? I’ve rarely stopped to ask that question. I’ve always assumed the answer is “more than I have now.” It turns out that “more” is a moving target. Psychologists call it the “hedonic treadmill.”
Not only is the perfect the enemy of the good but the good is the enemy of the good enough. Follow the creed of good enough for long enough and something remarkable happens. The “enough” drops away, like a snake sloughing its skin, and what remains is simply the Good.
It’s easier to probe the quantity of attention than the quality. We measure what is easiest to measure, not what matters most.
Because it was not just a notebook. Thoughts committed to paper represent a record of our mind at its most attentive. These rapt moments are fragile things, sand dogs on High Street, and, once lost, nearly impossible to recover.
It is our duty, almost a holy responsibility, says Gould, “to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses.”
She never expected her words to be read by others, which explains why others find them such a joy to read. The Pillow Book is written with the naked honesty typically reserved for the anonymous and the dying.
Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going until you start moving. So move. Start where you are. Make a single brushstroke and see where it leads.
Implicit in Shōnagon’s philosophy is this: Who we are is largely shaped by what we choose to surround ourselves with.
As the Roman senator and Stoic philosopher Seneca said: “No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely… disaster is virtue’s opportunity.”
“Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.” This strikes me as both extremely true and extremely obvious. Of course some things are up to us and some aren’t. I traveled two thousand miles for this? But that single sentence expresses the essence of Stoicism. We live in an age where we’re told everything is up to us. If you’re not smarter or richer or thinner it’s because you’re not trying hard enough. If you get sick, it’s because of something you ate, or didn’t eat, or a medical test you failed to get, or did get, or an exercise you didn’t do, or overdid, or a vitamin you did or did
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Rob knows his Stoic attitude didn’t change the outcome, but it did change how he endured it. He suffered but he did not compound his suffering by wishing life were otherwise.
Much of life lies beyond our control, but we command what matters most: our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions. Our mental and emotional life. We all possess Herculean strength, superhero powers, but it is the power to master our interior world. Do this, the Stoics say, and you will be “invincible.”
Imagine, says Epictetus, you handed over your body to a stranger on the street. Absurd, right? Yet that’s what we do with our mind every day. We cede our sovereignty to others, allowing them to colonize our mind. We need to evict them. Now. It’s not so difficult. It is far easier to change ourselves than to change the world.
We can inoculate ourselves against the bite of disappointment by switching from external to internal goals: not winning the tennis match but playing our best game; not seeing our novel published but writing the best, most honest one we are capable of writing.
Old age does not produce new personality traits so much as it amplifies existing ones. As we age, we become more intensely ourselves. Usually, not in a good way.
Too much recollection isn’t good. We risk remaining shackled to our past selves: forever the heroic soldier or beautiful young woman. This kind of past is frozen, and a frozen past is a dead past.
Friends matter when you’re young. They matter more when you’re old. In addition to the usual benefits—shared interests, a shoulder to cry on—friends link your present self with your past self. That’s why losing a friend is especially painful when you’re older. You’re losing not only a friend but a piece of your past, too. A piece of yourself.
Old age, Beauvoir believed, should rouse passion, not passivity, and that passion must be directed outward. Have projects, not pastimes. Projects provide meaning.
“Know thyself,” the Greeks implore but don’t tell us how. Montaigne does. You know yourself by taking chances, making mistakes, then starting over, Sisyphus-like.
