I didn’t have the chance to write much this week, so this will be a short post. Actually, I will steal a habit from Stoics to justify the length of this blog post.
It’s a common Stoic practice to journal, meditate, reflect upon, and apply philosophical principles to real life. They believed that the repetition and the effort of applying important (yet simple) principles were key to using the wisdom. Here are two quotes about this practice of daily meditation/journaling from the famous Stoics:
If you didn’t learn these things in order to demonstrate them in practice, what did you learn them for? [Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook]
Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day. [Seneca, Letters from a Stoic]
I found this practice useful because, at some point, it becomes a play where you focus on only one principle and try to apply it to different situations on a regular day. Let me give you a principle to chew on today, perhaps for the week. As a soon-to-be psychologist, though, I’d like to provide a principle backed by science.
This is about a Stoic discipline called the discipline of desire. I can summarize this discipline with a Latin phrase that Nietche popularized: Amor fati. You can also see this phrase in many arms as tattoos. It means love of faith: To accept and love all the events that (may) happen to us.
During Marcus Aurelius’s leadership, Rome was constantly attacked by the “barbarian” neighboring tribes. Not only does Marcus fight with different tribes, but he also loses a significant amount of his soldiers and citizens due to a plague pandemic. If Marcus saw these events as bad fortune, he might have lost his temper and the upcoming challenges, demising the great Roman Empire. Instead, he accepted such challenges, saw them as obstacles to bear, and even loved them. Amid those wars, in the sixth book of his not-intended-to-be-published journal, he reminds himself:
In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us—like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, 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 impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. [Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, New Translation (Modern Library)]
According to research from Michigan University, the love of fate actually “helps mitigate negative emotions from arising in adults given their “balanced” acceptance of the good and bad of life, which in turn can help foster experiences of positive psychological adjustment, and help deter experiences of negative psychological adjustment.”
This is it. This is the quote for the day or the week. As I also discussed in “Why should you let small bad things happen?”, perhaps it can be meditative to see all those small obstacles throughout the day as obstacles to overcome or even obstacles that give opportunities to practice letting go of the things we can’t control.
Best regards,
Bugra
Amor fati - one of my dearest Stoic principles! A great reminder. Thank you!