Mind the Beginner

No, not a herring! Although that would be a valid answer.

Do you have huge plans in your life, great big things you want to accomplish, cutting down the mightiest tree with that herring no less? Did you ever actually try chopping down a huge tree? It’s very hard and backbreaking work. Cutting it down to size so you have firewood seems a good idea but again, it takes a lot of time to do that, even with the help of a chainsaw.It’s so much work in fact that you’re never going to do it in your life.

All those wondrous plans you have are those mighty trees. Every single one of them is a huge effort and because it’s an established fact that gen y people expect everything handed on a silver platter you’ll never cut those trees down. You don’t have what it takes, and just so you know, neither do I.

So we have ourselves a small problem don’t we, we want firewood, and lots of it, but we don’t want to chop down that huge tree. But as is the case with most forests, there are much smaller trees there too. Pick on something your own size, it’s much easier to chop down.

The small ones will do

Things get progressively worse though. You start out in life with your mind filled with small trees. These small trees represent everything you want to do in life. Do you recall what you wanted to do back in preschool? You either had unrealistic trees (Becoming an astronaut is quite unrealistic) of you had saplings. A quick swing and you realised what you wanted.

But then you got older, not only did bigger trees materialize in your forest-mind. But those saplings grew and grew too. Some of these saplings turn out to be misconceptions about how life works. A few put you on the wrong path altogether.

Start swinging

As with everything in life you have a choice here. It’s not the choice of starting to gather firewood, that’s just something you’ll have to do in life. It’s where you get it. Will you keep looking up at those huge trees, wishing you had what it takes to take down that tree. Style points are awarded if you chop it down with the herring. You either don’t have enough firewood, or you take down the smaller trees. One day your stamina will definitely be enough, and your skill honed to such a level that those mighty trees are no longer an issue.

But for now, don’t bother with those big ones, there is more than enough to do down here. Not only can you create a fulfilling feeling taking down a tree, but you prevent those small misconceptions from growing to big to handle.

And now real life

All this talking about trees is nice and all, but do you have any idea what I’m talking about here? A small translation seems a good idea:

You can not without considerable luck achieve those huge plans you have without taking on smaller challenges first to hone your skills. As for those misconceptions in life, the longer you let them grown the harder it will be to get rid of them.

What is your mightiest tree?

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards – Soren Kierkegaard

In my previous post the Truth had a central role. In this blogpost again the Truth is an important thing. The Truth after all is what is right now, this very instant. And as soon as you think about it you’re thinking about the past. You can’t even pin the word “now” to actual now before it becomes past. Trivial though it seems this means that you can’t capture the moment. All you can do is accept it and live in it without trying to fight it.

So many people out there are constantly looking towards the future or the past to identify the perfect moment to do something. Mostly that moment was in the past and if you’re lucky you might find a moment in the future that’s perfect for what you want. The problem with that moment in the past of course is that you can’t relive that moment although you might understand the lessons and take that with you into the future. The problem with the future is that it’s distracting from the now.

Living forward is all there is. One moment after the next, following each other at instant speed. Trying to understand is dealing with the past, trying to look into the future is distracting from what is happening. We continuously hunt down the precious moments in our lives, but we’re always late or early.

Living without dealing with past or future robs us of all meaning it seems. I recall a fellow student of Cheng Hsin a few years ago who described trying to be perfectly in the now, the more he tried the less he was actually doing because almost all tasks were either dealing with something from the past or preparing for the future. Eventually he decided to give up in being perfectly now because it was boring and unproductive. He took things so far that he wouldn’t even brew a cup of coffee because brewing was preparing for the future event of drinking the coffee. This lasted for only a few hours before the decision to give in and act “normal” again. Possibly it’s the caffeine addiction that pushed him over the edge.

Preparing for now is impossible, preparing for the past senseless, preparing for the future a shot in the dark. That shot in the dark is your best guess out of the three options and is a very good idea indeed. Study the past and understand, prepare for the future and brew that cup of coffee, just don’t forget about this moment.   …to late… it already passed.

A bit more reading on the subject:

-Time-place dissonance and the quick fix

-The prison of the mental world

This blogpost is part three in a series of five exploring the Stoic psychological tactics that can be used to rediscover joy in your life.

Let go of the past and the present. That’s what fatalism is here. In certain religions and in the Roman Empire it’s accepted that we as individuals and we as a society have a predestined path to walk. In other words fate or as Seneca puts it “it’s a great consolidation that it is together with the universe we are swept along”. The Stoics believed firmly in the Fates and that we are all nothing more than actors in a play that has already been written. Things simply put, are just as they are and “happen as they do happen”. According to Marcus, a good man will welcome “every experience that the looms of fate may weave for him”.

Complaining about the fates

As I said the Roman Stoics like all Romans took it for granted that they had a fate and that they could not escape that fate. For the Romans life was a written play or a fixed race, the plot or outcome was already known to the Gods. (Or to the three Fates to be more precise: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos)

Now it might seem a bit strange that the Stoics believe in the dichotomy of control and at the same time advocate fatalism. After all, if the future was set in stone already we wouldn’t have control over anything in life now would we.

This is where things get a bit confusing. Although the Stoics believed in the Fates they didn’t practice fatalism with regards to the future. No, they only practiced it with regards to the past and the present. The future was left open until it became the present. They didn’t just sit round moping and complaining that everything was already decided. If things were already decided, complaining wouldn’t do them any good now would it.

Combined fatalism and burning your finger

What the Stoics did do however was combine fatalism with the dichotomy of control. This very instant and everything before it that we know as the past can not be changed anymore. We have no control over the past or the present and thus we should not concern ourselves with it. The fact that the past can’t be changed is widely accepted. But why can’t we change the present? This is again a bit of a mind game. As soon as we act on the present the present is the past.

Stick your finger in a flame and your body will react to it by pulling back your finger even before it hurts. But how long did the neurons take to tell your muscles to contract because of the flame? More than enough time to make the finger in the flame a matter of the past.

We didn’t change the fact that our finger was in the flame, but with some control over things to come (a blister if we don’t cool our finger under running water) we do have some control over the future. It is of course possible to affect what will happen ten years from now, or a week, an hour or even half a second. But as soon as it’s the present it’s our of our hands.

The paradox of ambition

You see, the past and present can never be changed, so why worry about them any longer, they will only make us uncomfortable and distressed all over again without doing us any good. We can learn from the past, but that’s about all it’s good for.

In this regard and combining this tactic with the first two I described you might think the Stoics were very unambitious, being happy with every experience the Looms of Fate weave for them. The truth couldn’t be more different. Seneca was (among other things) a political adviser, investor and play writer. Marcus Aurelius was (aside from a stoic philosopher) the Roman Emperor. You couldn’t get more ambitious than that back in those days. If anything these guys were highly ambitious and achieved great things in their lifetime.

A nice paradox is unfolding itself in front of our eyes it seems. Accepting that the future is already written and being happy and content with the simplest of things. The Stoics believed in living accordance with nature. Humans are by nature a social species and it’s for the best of society that everyone take part and did their social duty. If by fate Marcus found himself the Roman Emperor there is nothing there that prohibited him from enjoying that, the looms of Fate made him Emperor and it was his social duty to perform that task as best as he could. He kept in mind however that all things were temporary and that one day he would no longer be the Emperor, or be alive for that matter.

Stoic Riches

Note also that the Stoics were financially comfortable and that Seneca and Marcus in particular had riches beyond their dreams. That would seem strange if they didn’t care for such things and didn’t concern themselves with what we today can call consumerism. (Getting the latest gizmo’s just because..) Although they did have an income, they hardly spent it and certainly not on those trivial things. It’s through “living below your means” (As is being taught by hundreds of financial blogs and books) that they amassed wealth. Although they didn’t crave wealth it was because of their philosophy that they did achieve this.

Be happy about whatever comes on your path and enjoy it while it’s there, it will be in the past tomorrow. Don’t worry about it however, you can’t change it anyway.

De posts in the Stoic psychological tactics series:

1. Negative Visualisation

2. The Dichotomy of control

3. Fatalism

4. Self-Denial

5. Meditation