Category: Philosophy

Your days are numbered

I love this quote by Marcus Aurelius especially during this trying time, where we are re-discovering just how valuable each day is. We tend to live our life like time is infinite, when logically we know this is not true, but our actions tend to lead us toward filling time versus valuing it. His analogy of throwing open the windows of your soul to the sun, means your days are numbered and you must express yourself, be yourself, and stop all the bullshit and value your time on this earth. The second part of this quote reminds you that our time is limited and wasting our life on trivial shit, becomes a life that is wasted.

The stoics did a good job reminding us we are all mortal. In fact we die a little bit everyday, getting a little closer to our demise. You may live another 10, 20, 30, or 40 years or more, but you may also die tomorrow. I know all this sounds morbid, but understanding how fragile we all are has a great potential for helping us realize how valuable each moment is. Yes, you will die, but if you are reading this you are not dead yet.

Rejoice, do something important today, show someone you love them, and don’t waste your time.

Namaste

Learn while you teach

I’m sure you have experienced that when you teach something it accelerates your own learning. Could it be the students, or the preparation studying the material, or maybe a combination of both.

Seneca also says to associate with those that make you a better person, and welcome those who you can improve. You could interpret this as associate with people you can learn from, and share your knowledge with those that can learn from you.

Maybe today we seek out opportunities to share knowledge with others; not to bolster our ego, but to give back in some way. It might be as simple as sitting with a child and talking about letters or numbers. Maybe you show someone in your family a yoga pose that will relieve back pain. The opportunities are endless, and your reward includes the enhancement of your own knowledge.

Listen I know you are busy, worried, and a bit overwhelmed, but would 10 or 15 minutes to share some knowledge with a friend or family member really be that difficult. Hell do it for yourself if you must, even if it’s just to make you feel good about helping someone.

So that’s it for today. Your challenge is to impart some useful knowledge to someone. No fucking excuses!

Namaste

Who is your master?

One might equate gain to desire and avoid to fear in this quote from Epictetus. The very fact that you desire something whether it be a position, money, or some material thing indicates something or someone else is now in control. I liken this to Buddhist teachings about cravings. Something outside of ourselves becomes our master, and suffering ensues.

Of course our master may not be revealed by craving alone. Fear can as easily result in a loss of control. What we seek to avoid may not even come to pass, but this makes it no less real in our minds.

I don’t like to dwell upon current events too much as they are often portrayed as negative, and I just don’t want to invest my limited energy in them. Put another way I don’t watch the fucking news!

With that said, please don’t let this pandemic make you so fearful that you allow it to be your master. If you seek to gain anything from this moment have it be knowledge; this will allow you to remain the master of your domain.

Stay calm, stay safe, and be nice to everyone. You may be wise and strong, but there are many others who are not, and they need reassurance that all will be well.

Namaste

Today I escaped

This really resonated with me, as I am often the victim of my own thinking, making mountains out of mole hills if you will. I assumed what needed to be done would be difficult, or a situation came up that I perceived to be negative caused suffering. My monkey mind went into overdrive and I took the normal shit that happens and turned it into a nightmare. What the hell!

Sure the Buddha was right; life has more than it share of dukkha (pain and suffering), but how much of it is self imposed? As I have been studying stoicism recently I begin to notice certain parallels with Buddhism. Could the assumptions we make about things,  that Marcus Aurelius is talking about be yet another cause of dukkha, much like craving, desire, and attachment?

At the moment you start to say this is difficult, or I hate this situation, you are making assumptions and most of these are what will happen in the future. In fact in retrospect you find that most of your assumptions were bullshit.

Maybe the answer is in dealing with things as they occur in the present, without assumptions, expectations, and above all withholding judgment.

A bit of stoicism, Buddhism, and lots of yoga and meditation might help too.

Namaste

Blend in the crowd

What is Seneca really saying here? I think he is saying as a philosopher you will be different in the way you think and understand the world, but in public you should not appear different. Stoic philosophers like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius were certainly people who focused on finding meaning in life, figuring it out if you will, but they for the most part did not look down upon the masses. I don’t think what I’ve read about Seneca that he wanted to call attention to himself. He had a relationship with philosophy as a personal study with a few selected students. I think there was also the realization that even though he was a very educated and enlightened person in many ways, he was still part of humanity and did not want to come off as superior, at least when in public.

Namaste

The Power of Habits

So much of your success comes from the habits you possess as a person. Often we don’t even think much about them, for instance the way you brush your teeth, or comb your hair are habits that have been established over the period of many years. Many old habits are good and they are best left the way they are, other old habits are destructive and we know this, but continue this destructive behavior. Why? Well because it is a habit and habits are hard to change. Think about a bad habit you have, maybe it is eating too much or the wrong foods, drinking alcohol, or maybe smoking. Think back, when did this behavior become a habit? Probably a long time ago and every time you repeat this behavior the habit becomes more ingrained and becomes part of  yourself. The more you repeat the behavior the stronger the habit becomes. Most of these habits have triggers, such as a cup of coffee proceeds a cigarette, or Friday night means a trip to the party store to pick up your favorite beverage.

If old habits have a hold over you because they are so ingrained and have been repeated so many times, then why is it equally as difficult to adopt a new habit? To start with it might be that your old habits are occupying so much space in your head and time on your calendar that there is no room for a new habit. Now none of what I have mentioned so far is very encouraging, but for most of us it is true. We are habitual animals by nature, and these habits provide a well known script to live out our days. We also know that by not adopting new positive habits we are stagnating. So what’s the answer here?

My advice is that there is no silver bullet, no easy solution. The only thing that works for me is you become so sick and tired of a bad habit and it’s consequences, that you make some room for a better habit. Sometimes being sick of it is not enough, but you also need a healthy dose of fear interjected into the equation. So I’m sick to death of this stupid behavior and I am afraid of what is doing to my life. Remember I’m not talking about some silly stupid habit, but instead something life threatening. A habit that has it’s own gravitational pull, sucking you into the vortex. This isn’t something that a little will power or well intended affirmations is going to fix.

The power of the habit is immense and well your resolve is usually pretty pathetic, and you know it. If you could use self discipline or some other form of wishful thinking you probably wouldn’t have dug the hole so deep in the first place. I’ve read some people that advocate just replacing the bad habit with a new habit. Great advice Einstein, but that’s like putting a three year old up against a Champion Sumo Wrestler. An old ingrained habit has way more traction with you and cannot be replaced by the new habit of the day. I’m not saying anything you don’t know here, because like me you tried this mismatch and observed the consequences.

When you get to that point where the pain caused by the old habit far exceeds the pleasure, you might be ready to make a change. Here are a few approaches to consider:

  • Triggers – Think about the triggers for your bad habits and consider eliminating the triggers. This at least begins changing your behavior and if nothing else begins to give you some insight into the situations that are facilitating this habit.
  • Not all at one time – Don’t try and fix everything in a day. What I’m really saying is don’t try to conquer Rome until you have laid waste to Venice first. One of the biggest mistakes we make is I’m going to stop all the bad shit, and I am doing it today! This only limits your probability for success and that leads to my final approach.
  • Incremental progress – You took 20 – 30 years to create this not so great habit of yours, and you are going to defeat it in a day. You begin to delude yourself and get all hyped up on David Goggins video’s and you decide I’m done with this shit. Let’s get real about who we are going to do battle with. You don’t want to hear this because we all think we have so much self disciple, but my advice is start small. Begin undermining the beast, bit by bit, step by step, until you are in essence beginning to gain some self control. If you can’t stop a bad habit, at least defer it, start breaking the pattern, begin confusing yourself; remember your taking this thing down by hand, brick by brick. Another incremental technique is to adjust the dosage. Start using less of whatever it is that is fucking you up, and you will not only have some more time on your hands, but you are also chipping away at the beast.

Listen it became a habit because you did something hundreds or thousands of times; all this repetition has made it part of your identify. It has become somewhat powerful and you probably know that. Don’t beat yourself up over it and just accept that you can’t change this behavior, because you can. You didn’t build this habit in a day or week, and you can’t destroy it that quickly, but you can take action.

Namaste

The fools life

I really enjoyed this stoic quote by Epicurus as it covers three important areas including gratitude, fear, and not being present. Epicurus defines the fool as someone who is not grateful for what they have, is consumed by fears, and thinks only about the future. Talk about a path to misery. Do you know people like this? These people do not appreciate what they have, fear just about everything that is out of their control, and instead of living in the present they are focused on the future. You often here them say someday when I get that new job, buy that expensive house, have some free time I will be happy. Always looking towards the future for contentment and missing out on what is happening today.

Then there is this lack of gratitude expressed by so many people. They will say my job sucks, the people I work with are morons, the government is inept, and on and on; clearly never seeing all the wonderful things going on in their life. A fool wastes their life by not being present, not appreciating what they already have, and seeking something better that may or may not happen. We are all guilty of this from time to time, but we don’t turn it into a life philosophy. The fool just doesn’t know any better, they stay stuck in this mindset, and because they are a fool they don’t even know it.

You my friend are not a fool!

Namaste

Vices over time

It starts out innocent enough, a few drinks with your friends and later on it escalates into full blown addiction. Have you seen this whether it is alcohol, smoking, drugs, or over eating? These vices become a habit and habits are hard to break. Seneca seems to be saying it is easier to slow it down than to stop it. This is the power of our vices, in some ways they make us feel better, and we pattern our existence around them, making them so very potent. Rather than put yourself through the painful process of trying to stop, it is a wise person that never starts. Next time you tell yourself it won’t hurt to have that drink, try that drug, smoke that one cigarette, or eat that crap you know is clogging your arteries; think how easily these little missteps turn into a powerful self destructive habit.

Namaste

Have you no shame?

How can this happen? Why am I so disturbed by what is said to me or what goes on around me? Why do I give away my peace of mind so easily?

One of the big reasons we so easily become disturbed is that we care about what other people think. You make a mistake and are called out on it, and you begin questioning yourself. How could I be so stupid? I’m always fucking up. Epictetus is telling us that it is so easy for us to allow our circumstances to rule our thinking. If you are letting some perceived failure disturb your piece of mind consider this quote:

“Remember that failure is an event not a person.” Zig Ziglar

Listen, I mess shit up all the time, in fact it’s almost comical. With the intense frequency of screwing things up that I experience by now I would have been insane.

Another good example is someone institutes a new process that you think is extremely ill conceived. Most likely this process is out of your control, but instead of just forgetting about it, you spend countless hours being resentful, or feeling that you know better. Now because you are so much smarter than whoever came up with this process, you make yourself miserable. You begin to disengage at work, because they are just so stupid; what a bunch of morons.

Stop it! I mean you need to stop it right now. Your expectations of everyone acting or doing things that you want is completely messing you up. Stop reacting and start protecting your mind from all these outside influences. Seriously this shit that you let bug you will not even be on your radar a year from now, but you let it bug the hell out of you anyway. It’s not the problem that is disturbing you, it’s your reaction to the problem.

Namaste

 

Losing today

In our goal driven, hamster on a wheel, hedonistic life we look to the future for happiness, while all the time ignoring the present moment. Any happiness or satisfaction that life offers is now. There is nothing but the now.

Wake up, stop wishing for something that doesn’t exist. If you want to start a business, learn something, love someone, do it now. Your life is marching on and you are not present or aware; instead of living, you are dreaming about who you will be in the future. Accept it or not, the fact is there is no guarantee of the future, and sitting on your ass pondering it accomplishes nothing.

Namaste