“Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself? So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations ….to endure it and prevail is great good fortune. More than most, that fragment sums up what it means to have Complete Virtue in my modern practice. One key part of a modern practice that I am interested in exploring in the next several years is the pursuit of long term goals that will entail some measure of hardship and suffering. We talk mostly about using Stoicism to smooth out the edges of life, techniques to deal with pedestrian misfortunes and issues. But I think we are missing something profound if we do not take up grander projects to sharpen our Stoic Practice against. If we are disciplined in our practice, we build an edifice of theoretical or like-new virtue that lacks any true grit and grime from true tests. Like Mike Tyson says, Everyone gots a plan until they are hit in the face. I think we should deliberately seek out personal projects that can simulate being hit in the face. Starting from ZERO, NADA, SCRATCH, my personal project is going to learn how to hunt. Whats yours? vimeo/105686970
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 03:31:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015