I think I have always been a bit of a
Stoic. I just didn't always know it. The Life of a Stoic =
"A life spent practicing virtue and living in accordance with nature." You know practicing, not always getting there. Yes. Nature. That was kind of my Church. I spent lots of time dreaming under trees, sitting in tall grass. Trying to figure out what "being me," was all about. Leaning to the light, leaning to the
seven virtues,
doing what I
say I am going to do, being a
"man of his word," trying to be good, to live a good life, because
good is good.
Grinning and bearing it. Laughing thru the tears. Putting a positive spin on the chaos. As the great football coach Vince Lombardi once said: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." That was pounded into my head by my Dad when I was a young, recalcitrant, moody, edgy smart-aleck kid. My Dad also liked to say: "No one ever promised you a rose garden." I think my Dad was coaching me, but also coaching himself. You have deal with the deal, even if it sometimes seemed like a raw deal.
Doing the right, hard thing. Not because of Jesus, not because you were gonna go to Heaven, not to avoid going to Hell, but just because doing the right, hard thing was the good thing, being in a accord with Nature. In Nature and part of Nature too. Happy to be alive and breathing, despite the slings & arrows, the hurly-burly, the turmoil, the tragedy, death, destruction, the smoke & mirrors, the failures and fucked-up-ness.
This is it, the real deal, the deepest of wisdom. A humble soul, happy to push that boulder up a hill just to see it come crashing down with gusto. Futility is fun! Happy employing: will, discipline, fortitude, gumption, stick-to-it-tve-ness, and a carefree determination to be care-free. But of course, also caring of yourself and others.
The best Philosophy doesn't explain the meaning of it all, it points to a way to try to live in a complicated, complex, wondrous, mysterious, and contradictory Universe.
"The Stoics provided a unified account of the world, constructed from ideals of logic, monistic physics, and naturalistic ethics. Of these, they emphasized ethics as the main focus of human knowledge, though their logical theories were of more interest for later philosophers.
Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos). Stoicism's primary aspect involves improving the individual's ethical and moral well-being: "Virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with Nature".[9] This principle also applies to the realm of interpersonal relationships; "to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy",[10] and to accept even slaves as "equals of other men, because all men alike are products of nature".[11]
The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regard to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes"] A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy", thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole". This viewpoint was later described as "Classical Pantheism" (and was adopted by Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza)."
