To Stoic Beginnings!
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
— Excerpts from John Donne’s Oeuvre; Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
I’m digressing from my usual theme in this post. I attribute the genesis of this write-up to the time of the year and not some profound metaphysical thinking on my part. I’m also going to take a leaf out of Ernest Hemingway’s book, For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’m starting with the above lines just as he did and… it ends there. It would be a sacrilege to think I will give as much poetic justice to the above lines as Hemingway did, so please don’t have such lofty expectations, and continue reading bearing in mind that this post was written by a newbie blogger, who specialized in finance and recently took to writing as a fun way to kill time.
It’s that time of the year; the city sports a festive look, it’s a long break world over, the weather is great and the overall mood is lively and cheerful. (This post will make more sense to those of us who have quieter get-togethers and go to bed sober.) It’s also that time of the year when we sit back and reflect on the year gone by. Images of the year flash in our heads, complete with 3D effects and Dolby sound. Sometimes we give this one night so much importance that these vivid images extend to several years past and not just the previous year.
Some of us think of our loved ones not with us — either departed or living away, some of us think of the years spent partying through the night without a worry in the world, some of us think of our incomplete bucket list, the weight we haven’t lost, the music lessons we didn’t take, our failures and successes, we reflect on words said and unsaid, our health and so on. Eventually these myriad of emotions make us hope.
We hope for a million things to change, improve, maintain status quo etc in the coming year.
Hope is dangerous. It makes you vulnerable. I’m here to tell you to abandon hope. I hear the expletives! I know you think this is all some psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. I felt the same when I read it for the first time. If I manage to get across what I intend to, life should be a breeze. You float through the years and your graph of emotions would look like — — and not a roller coaster ride that looks like /\/\/\.
This isn’t a philosophy coined out of thin air, these are snippets of things I’ve been reading that I’ve compiled here. I’d be happy if I strike a chord with half a molecule in anyone who reads this.
When you hope for something or put on a forced positive attitude, then, when whatever you were hoping for didn’t materialize, you are left dejected/upset/stressed. Happiness ought to come regardless of the circumstances. (This process shouldn’t be mixed up with your spiritual practices. It’s a way of living.)
To do so, one would have to remain stoic, no matter what challenges one were to face. Indian philosophy says, if you remain unfazed by your emotional bondages, you have attained nirvana — a transcendent state that is the final goal in life. Now, once I use such jargon, we instantly conjure up images of Rishis doing penance and meditating. We humor our imagination further and think of Apsaras, Kamadhenu—the milk giving cow—and demons. And, like me, you would’ve lost track of time in the mystical world of mythology — not much the wiser and without any progress with nirvana.
That’s why I like the word stoicism. It has an air of pragmatism around it. It’s an ancient philosophy that says the same thing most other philosophies do; remain untethered regardless of the circumstances.
Stoicism isn’t enduring the pain and smiling through it, or suppressing thoughts or being devoid of emotion. It’s a very humane concept. To paraphrase the philosopher, Massimo Pigliucci, Stoicism isn’t masking your emotions, it’s getting to the source of it, reflecting on it, accepting it, dealing with it in the most rational way and eventually moving on without any breakdowns/meltdowns/physical manifestations.
In time, as you master stoicism, your reaction to your stressors/things that upset you/people who bothered/ aches and pains you feel — will be nothing more than a deep breath in and out. You’d be as cool as a cucumber — zen!
It sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Also like most philosophers, I’m telling you what to do and not how. I do know one thing though, if you do manage to figure out how to put all this into practice, I’ll be very jealous! I’m still working on it. Perhaps that’s what makes the journey remarkable. It’s custom made, by you, especially for you, and there’s no way you’ll relapse into being enslaved by your emotions.
The only way I can help with the “how” is to copy a prayer that appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Slaughterhouse-Five:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference”.
We’re all part of a much bigger picture — we just need to figure out how we fit into the broader scheme of things. To trivialize it by constantly worrying or being shrouded in sadness or anger would be a shame, so
send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Happy New Year!
