What stands in our way becomes the way

Today I would like to introduce another concept of Stoicism. Arguably the greatest Stoic to have ever lived was Marcus Aurelius, a man whose methods and books I find utterly intriguing and urge everyone to investigate. In his book meditations, he has a quote that I that begins the thought process of the today. “Our actions may be impeded… But there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impeding to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” That last line is the key to this whole concept. “What stands in our way becomes the way.”

I would like to give some examples of this mindset in action. I will note that I don’t know if these people practice any particular stoic practices or are in any way influenced by that mindset, but I can tell you that these mindsets are perfect literal examples of the mindset that Marcus Aurelius talks about. First up is one of the richest and most influential people on the planet, Oprah Winfrey. It is an impossible task to put into a couple of sentences the magnitude of her achievements, but she truly has grown herself from very little relatively into a world-famous name with incredible power and influence. In 1976 Oprah accepted her first news anchor job in Baltimore. She spent only a few months in a co-anchoring job with the king of the local news of the day, Jerry Turner. During these few months, Oprah was made fun of, she was humiliated on and off screen, she experienced the worst sexism the news rooms of those days had to offer and was also consistently demoted. However, if you ask her today about those experiences she will say that whilst they are not fond memories, their existence as obstacles turned her into a woman. Turned her into the Oprah Winfrey we know today. Instead of being beaten down in spirit by the happenings at this station, she took a step back and learned the lessons that were being provided to her. When she took her step back, she accepted the reality of the situation and made a conscious effort from then on to do her best to be a positive impact on all those around her. To gain enough influence, money, and spirit to actually make a difference for women in the work place starting with television. If adversary is the best teacher, Oprah Winfrey is one of the best students.

Our second story comes from arguably one of the greatest con men in history, Thomas Edison. Why he should be considered a con artist is a story for a different day, however there is a success story of his that applies this stoic mindset perfectly. He was coming home for dinner once, and he had his traditional family set up for dinner that night with his family. As he just settled down, someone from the community rushed into his home and told him that his factory was on fire. Immediately, he rushed out to inspect the blaze and arrived to see the entire factory engulfed in flame. Imagine having a piece of work on your laptop that glitches and gets deleted but a thousand times worse. The fire was unique because the flames were quoted as reaching the tips of the sky. The flames were spewing out all different colours. Reds, greens, blues, purples, oranges, whites, and yellows burst out of the building in what I imagine looked like the worlds deadliest rainbow. It would be conceivable if Edison in this moment had gone berserk and was consumed by rage and sadness but instead, he turned to the person who had told him about the fire and said “go and fetch your mother and all her friends. They will never see another fire like this ever again.” This thinking pattern was one of acceptance of the situation. This factory was bringing in $1,000,000 per year for him which is maybe $200,000,000 per year by todays standards. His acceptance of the situation and his reaction to it was importance. He had the factory partially running again within 3 weeks and was able to invest into a better plan for the building upon the restructure so that after 12 months, the factory now brought in $10,000,000 annually instead the $1,000,000. The obstacle that stood in the way in this case was a factory fire, and since this was out of Edison’s control it became the only way for him to go. So, he applied what he knew already about his factory and improved on those ideas to create something better. This distanced perspective allowed him the chance to improve his income and allowed for more investment in patents for inventions.

The last one is not a real-life story, but rather the application of this mindset in a fantasy world. More specifically, Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling has been a Marcus Aurelius fan for years and applied these lessons in her stories. Lord Voldemort is one such application of this stoic mindset in that he is the opposite of what a stoic is. He is not accepting of situations and allows emotions to take command of his actions. He tries to change his path after refusing to accept his death as an eventual reality and instead chases immortality. His pursuit leads him down a dark path of murder, lies, deception and ultimate wickedness. His constant attempts to control things that will not be and cannot be ultimately leads to his downfall. I am aware that the whole story is not a message on Stoicism but J.K. is a fan of Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism and it is perfectly believable that this has influenced her work with this character’s development.

These principles can be applied on a large or a small scale in everyday life. It is a life philosophy that requires practice rather than words. To be able to accept the things we cannot control even when they are harmful to us are, apply a healthy mindset to the situation and not only gain something from what hurt us but to gain more than we had before is always possible. There is a saying from ancient roman days that if one were to come along who can truly and deeply apply these methods, then not even Phalaris’ famous brazen bull could break them.

Happy New Year

I so desperately wanted to join in the wishing of happy new years to everyone on my social media and beyond, but to do so without a look back on 2017 would have been an insult to such a memorable year. Then to try and fit that into a status for all of you to read you would have likely unfriended me. So, writing in this format seems a happy compromise.

2017 I honestly think was the greatest year of my life (so far). I am using the word ‘greatest’ in the sense of simply the number of things that happened to me, the number of friends I made, the amount of experiences I had and the amount of emotions I felt. The end of 2017 was particularly hard as I lost my father in early October. This encounter with mortality with was a heavy hit and still is a raw wound for me.  This experience brought one final life lesson from my father, whether he intended it or not. But we’ll get to that later.

One of the greatest realisations I had in that moment was the amount of support I received from many old friends and many friends that I had also only made the previous months. The sheer amount of love and support sent my way was truly helpful in a way that is hard to put into words, but all I have in my heart is thank you to all who reached out and helped in some way.

During this time, I felt a lot of reminiscing happening with my time in Amsterdam, Zurich, Fuerteventura, London, Baden, Jungfrau to name a few places I’ve been. The memories and photos will stay with me for a lifetime and that’s what truly made this year the greatest year of my life. But when I look back, I realised that a lot of my deepest connections with my new-found friends came from when we avoided small talk. When we broached topics of philosophy, religion, life advice, death and whether we should get McDonalds at 3am. These are the people I have found that I have stayed in contact with and who I keep having these talks with.

I’d like to extend a line of thinking in this post with what is a simple model for being happier in 2018. The mindset is one of a Stoic mindset. It all essentially boils down to this. Throughout our lives, the only things that we can ever control are our thoughts and our actions. Everything else beyond this is out of our control and any attempts to try and control them will often result in failure and all the negativity that comes along with it. When I say this to people, they generally nod their head and say “yeah I know that and I should try it, but…” and a cycle of angry/confusing/disappointed talking points start again so let me reiterate. The only things we ever control are our words and our actions.

This is a simple message from an ancient Roman philosophy, which if you’re interested in learning more about then a simple google search of Stoicism or Epicureanism will provide you with some more materials. For now though, I’d like to come back to one specific idea. It sounds basic, it sounds typical and is offered around the world constantly but here it is. Value what you already have. Value the life and the people you have with you right here and now. Too often, we forget to desire the things that we already have.

If you want a little taste of this, get away from all the technology in your house for 24 hours and realise how much value you give it. You don’t even have to physically do it, just imagine what your life would really be like without the technology you have around you right now. Now bring that to a human scale. Imagine yourself dying or a loved one dying. Just for 30 seconds in your own mind. You will hopefully feel a pang in your heart to reach out to them and remind them how valued they really are to you. I’m not saying go over to their house and sob on their shoulder but a reminder that everything around us is fleeting shouldn’t be a depressing one, it should make you cherish everything that is around us for our brief appearance on this little blue planet.

That was my Dad’s final lesson to me, and I thank him for it.

An Easter Miracle

  I might seem like a strange choice to be writing something about miracles at Easter time but this time of year seems appropriate for the message I will try and convey in this musing. First things first though, it has been a little while since I’ve posted on here so I shall open this essay by apologising to anyone who has so far read these things with even the vaguest, bored interest for taking so long. It’s been a really busy time for me recently and I have wanted to post about a whole bunch of things happening in the world but haven’t had the time. Now so much has happened that I couldn’t possibly write about just one. Clearly I’d make a terrible journalist. Most of the things happening in the news are generally bad things, or at the very least, making a lot of us uncomfortable. So in a vain attempt to try and make a tiny percentage of the world feel better about themselves (in this case, that’s you), I want to point your attention to a miracle in all our lives. It’s appropriate that this is being written on Easter Sunday huh?

  First, it is important to understand the definition of a miracle. It’s generally accepted that a miracle is defined as an event that has occurred that is generally not explained via natural or scientific laws as the odds of such of an event are more or less 0%.

  There is a miracle that has happened to you already. The fact that you are sat there right now. Not just that any person is sat there, but that you specifically are sat there. That you are specifically you as oppose to being someone (or something else). Your DNA has reproduced itself for billions of years to get you to right where you are at this very moment. The chances that you even exist are so remote that you fall into the category of a miracle.

  The chances of one of your fathers twelve trillion sperm cells just happening to collide with one of your mothers thousands of eggs is incredibly unlikely. And that’s just your parents having you. Not to mention it had to be your grandparents having specifically your parents. Your great grandparents having specifically your grandparents. If you multiply just those odds, you should feel like you won the lottery. Now multiply those odds down every generation of human or humanoid species. You are currently and undeniably at the end of your own perfect, spectacular and unbroken ancestral chain that starts with you and goes all the way to the very first single celled organism over four billion years ago. That. Is. A. Miracle. And we can remind ourselves of this when we tell ourselves that we are a bit fat, that our lives are a bit rubbish or that we could look better.

  This life is the only life we will ever have accompanied by the one body we will ever have. We can be kinder to ourselves, and consequently to others as well because we are all doing it. We are all at times carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. I’m really grateful if anyone is reading this right now and has that sense of profundity, but I of course understand it is much harder when you are just trying to get through your every day. I think it is important however to occasionally return to the present moment. It is truly all we have and it can help, at least it helps me, to remember this every so often. It’s important to realise how we are treating ourselves and others in the present moment. These small moments of introspective understanding can aid all of us in having a happier life. Remember…

You are the miracle. Happy Easter.

Image – Biologos.org

Easy political points is humanities loss

  Sometime in 2011, I became really interested in politics and particularly American politics. This was mostly down to people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (closest British versions I suppose would be Ian Hislop and Paul Merton). Over this time I’ve exposed myself to different ideas and nuances about positions and people who run for office whereas before this awakening, I really didn’t care that much. It has been a really eye-opening and somewhat horrifying experience (it would be unfair to think of it as purely a journey of discovery). I am also aware that I do live in my own small bubble of news that gets reinforced to me on a daily basis thanks to social media and the news organisations I follow. I am trying to change.

  But in this short essay I would like to tackle political discourse in the Western world, or more accurately, how many debatable issues are being coupled together.

  In everyday life where ordinary people live, you can ask them their opinion on a certain issue and they will fall on a spectrum of how much they take one side or the other. However, there is a trend that has been happening for a number of years now where these highly charged and deeply complex issues will get grouped together. A recent one that springs to mind in America recently was how, particularly southern states pushed to teach creationism in schools as a counter argument to evolution and the Big Bang as to our existence. The argument from these religious people essentially came down to ‘we believe this at home and we just want you to teach the controversy’. The other side of this argument said ‘you can teach that in the religious classes but not the science classes’.

  This is a debate that is still actually going on, but what has happened is that the people on the ‘teach the controversy’ side have tried to demonize the other side by saying ‘well those elitists on the other side believe in humans coming from monkeys and the world is getting hotter and just want to mooch off the state’. The people on the other side generally say ‘well if you believe in that you probably also think guns should be allowed in schools, that immigration should cease and capital punishment should be enforced’. The absurdity of it!

  Another example, let’s take the issue of abortion. One side is pro-choice, the other is pro-life. One says women’s right to choose, the other says you can’t murder a child as a life choice. If you happen to fall on the pro-life part of the spectrum then it’s likely that those on the other side will say you also don’t believe that women should have equal pay, that campuses shouldn’t enforce sexual assault laws because it might ‘ruin a young man’s life’ and ‘the national minimum wage doesn’t need an increase, you just need to work harder’. If you are on the pro-choice side then the other side are likely to say ‘well you murder babies so why should I listen to anything you have to say?’

  Even a little closer to home, if you voted for Brexit then you’re definitely a racist who no longer wants a Polish family living next door, if you voted remain then you want Britain to be ruled by a totalitarian regime in Brussels.

  The result of this has left a lot of the population of the Western world opening political debates at the pub on a Friday night with “Are you Labour or Conservative?” “Democrat or Republican?” “Left or Right?” “Ice-Cream or Cookies?” It’s incredibly polarising to believe that anyone who votes differently from you must have had their moral code effaced by some outside and misplaced force in their lives. The truth is not only do they think the same about you but you are both also correct. That outside force is the inability to talk about an issue without thinking of your opponent as the enemy. In all likelihood, you and the person you find yourself struggling to not punch because of their views probably fall closer on these spectrum’s of political belief than you might realise. All it takes is a little nuance and a willingness to find common ground. If this trend continues the way it has, then an inability to come together to tackle one issue will become an inability to come together on any issue.

(I should point out several other things here. I haven’t taken a position on any of the above mentioned issues and if you feel I have sided with one over the other that was not my intention. Another thing I should point out is that this is not me advocating nationalism/Alt-right/Nazism as a ‘different point of view’. More of a reach to the moderates who have become falsely labelled as such)

Photo credit Calvin & Hobbs