Every day you will be confronted with things outside of your control. Sickness, storms, theft, accidents - these are the facts of life. They are not good or bad, but simply are. These indifferent things cannot harm you. Rather, you harm yourself when you judge these accidental facts as detrimental. For whatever happens is a part of nature, and nothing that is natural is bad in itself - only when we make it so. And so things outside of your control are nothing to regret, or worry about, or fear. When you are faced with indifferent matters of chance such as these, tell yourself: 'I am freed from the burden of trying to control this.' How much more peaceful to be concerned only with those things which you can affect. Nature cannot be otherwise. If we are to be only a part of it, we must accept all that it confronts us with.
Through drawing this division in your mind, you can separate the wheat from the chaff and safely discard that which we cannot control. With practice, you can train yourself to recognize this more easily. Soon you will mold and temper your mind in such a way to accept the stresses and weights placed upon it. If you make disciplining your judgement a habit, you will flex where previously you would have snapped. With practice, you can ride the waves of emotion that used to crash around you. To domesticate your emotions, rather to be ruled by them - to stand up straight, not straightened - is to live in accordance with nature (1). Only then can you respond properly to that which truly matters - matters of choice. Honest choice and just action are only possible with the clarity of a disciplined mind. So you must start at the beginning - by watching your thoughts and rejecting those judgments of indifferent things.
These are the teachings of the Stoic school. I hope that these writings find you in good fortune, and if you find the present difficult to bear, that I can lend you some of the relief that I have found in these old books. Some of our childhood friends have told me that you have adopted the Epicurean tradition of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll (2). These pleasures are not in themselves bad. But through them one can develop vice. So it is my duty to warn you of the life of pleasure. Examine what this life looks like, where it leads, and how you will feel when it is over. And so I can only share my personal arguments against the Epicurean school, and hope that you receive them before you have fully adopted their doctrine.
The Stoic ethic stems directly from their worldview, one that is in sharp contradiction to the Epicurean. Allow me to draw the distinction through illustration. Remind yourself of the beautiful and diverse forms that nature takes. This is a pleasure in itself. The thousands of different birds, with their hollow bones and colorful feathers, are not unlike the variety of people and situations that you will be faced with every day. Life appears random because we are too small to see the whole picture. But there is a deep order to all things, and this order is sometimes revealed for a moment in the beauty of nature. It is from this order that a sense of duty stems, and from that duty nature reminds us that pleasures should be tempered. Nature reveals our nature, and through it, the way to happiness.
Consider bees. Their wings are laughably small, so much so that their flight was argued to be impossible. But the wings of bees are finely tuned to the size of their large, fuzzy bodies so as to maximize the amount of pollen they can carry. Bees waste nothing: they use this pollen to make honey - pure energy - and spend this time and energy to build a hive for future generations. Bees intuitively use what we must use math to prove: that hexagons are a fantastic shape for building. A grid of tessellated hexagons maximizes the perimeter surface area per unit volume better than any other shape (Figures 1 and 2). Each cell of the honeycomb has entry and exit points. And this fantastically complex and astonishingly regular honeycomb was built simultaneously, with bees starting at different corners and in the middle, meeting and converging at the borders. Bees can fill a sheet of any size with no gaps. A hive of bees may as well be one organism. (It certainly evolves as one.) And a hive functions perfectly with its environment, too. Bees grow and evolve with the flowers, predicting each other's changes to the benefit of the whole natural world.
This sense of wonder found in nature is not idle chatter. You must recognize your common identity and strive to live up to the orderly ideal of nature. Strive to be like a bee, which never fails to fulfill its function (3). Function as a human in the fullest sense - not as mere animal, or individual, or even father, but as a member of the greatest family to grace the universe: nature. In your dealings with others, build a honeycomb. Think and act correctly even when you are separated from others. In doing so, all of humanity will harmonize with each other and in accord with the universal order of nature. To do otherwise - to lie, to act unjustly, and to be misled by false perceptions - is to act against nature and betray the beauty all natural beings hold inside of themselves.
For the sense of beauty that we find in the sand and the surf and the stars is not something exterior to us humans. Nature is not a beautiful object - it is beautiful because we are part of its order (4). And so the concept of symmetry appeals to us innately as a reflection of the universal order of nature. Yet I'll be the first to tell you that asymmetry can be as beautiful as the most regular snowflake. The splaying of a field of corn, the blotches of a cow, the cracks on a loaf of bread, a chipped tooth, a beauty mark, or strand of hair that escapes again and again from its position behind the ear - these are the hauntingly beautiful visions of life (5). Their appeal is found not in order but disorder. Asymmetry reminds us of life's incredible fragility. For just as ripe fruit tastes the sweetest just before it spoils, life is all the sweeter with the knowledge that it is short. Symmetrical forms in the natural world show us that life is resilient; a species persists beyond any individual. This is why all living things reproduce - a kind of immortality - creating new life in their image and striving to persist in the world. Life is an order grafted onto the world that can stand up against the erosion of entropy. But inevitably things wear down and fall apart. And asymmetry gently reminds us of this fact - not in a distressing way, but like a friend who allows you to appreciate all the good that still remains. This gives youth a vibrant energy - a whole life yet to be lived - and old age a wizened, graceful sense of the shortness of life.
Like all that is good and natural, bees are not an impossibility but, rather, the upper limit of an animal's shape, the logical conclusion of a specific purpose being filled in the natural world. Nature demands of the bees that they fulfill their function. And so too, nature demands that we fulfill ours. What is our function? To live in accordance to nature. Aristotle remarked that plants can eat and reproduce, and animals can see and feel. Pleasure belongs in this area of life. As humans we inhabit the pleasures of food and sex from time to time, but to rest there indefinitely is to betray our human nature for an animal one. No, I choose to transcend my animal nature for something higher. For we are animals gifted with a rational mind, itself a chance at serenity, wisdom, and happiness. Happiness comes first with the mastery of judgement, then of assent to nature, then in just action. To fail to achieve this internal mastery is to betray the trust that nature has placed in us by virtue of each of our astonishing lives.
The Epicureans claim that there is no order to nature. For them, the universe is random atoms, flailing about like the bodies of newborn calves. Let us suppose for the sake of argument, that this is true. Even if it were so, the answer to life's question is the same: suspend judgement to domesticate your emotions, assent only to that which is within your control, and act justly in the face of anything. These principles lead to happiness, even in the face of complete randomness. To ignore them entirely is to behave lower than an animal, which at least knows what is good for itself, unlike the fool who is angered by the falling of rain or the beating of the sun, as if they were unnatural. No, as Aurelius often said, providence or atoms - virtue is still up to you (6).
And we must engage life with a full stride, for death is nipping at our heels. The fragility of life, the shadow of death, hangs over your every action. There is no time to lose, and this makes virtue all the rarer. I will share an exercise that allows one to cultivate this sense of urgency. Imagine the moment you realize that you will die. Not now, but visualize yourself on your deathbed with hours to live. What emotions will you feel? Fear, maybe. Regret, maybe. Satisfaction, almost certainly not. What kind of person would feel satisfaction at the moment of death if they feel life has been unfairly revoked, and too early at that? The trick is in the realization that life is no one's lot, not by right. To live, to breathe, to read these very words on the page is an extraordinary fact of the universe. Most of it is and will always be lifeless. Even to think the thoughts you are now thinking is a rarity beyond comprehension. And that rarity means that the ability to think is constantly at risk of loss (7). So when the moment of death is upon you, say not 'why me' or 'why so soon' but: 'how amazing I was here at all' and 'I am thinking now, so I have more to do'.
What will the moment of death feel like? The smell of old flesh mixing with the incontinence and cleaning chemicals of a hospital bed. The engine of your body running hot - straining, gears grinding without oil, and finally melting. This is the moment when the delicate machinery of your body can no longer hold off the slow, inevitable decay that all living things must accept. This is when your billions of tiny bees working in concert cannot keep your body stitched together any longer. You will die surrounded by loved ones or truly alone - it is hard to say which is more preferable, to lose or to be lost - and when you die you will either dissolve into atoms or be released into the universal order that you were born into. In either case, it is nothing to fear. Only fear choosing to live a bad life (8). Bodily pleasures will fade even quicker than your memory of these words. So write words of your own and inscribe them on your heart, as here I have humbly attempted to do.
Your friend, both in life and living well,
Zachary G. Augustine
Figures
1 - Apis florea nest closeup (Sean Hoyland) 2 - A page of a book constructed from a hexagon (Robert Bringhurst)
3 - Bread (Zachary G. Augustine)
4 - Postcard from 1952 (Explosions in the Sky)
References
(1.1) “Stoicism is about the domestication of emotions, not their elimination.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.(1.2) “To stand up straight – not straightened.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. (Trans. Hays). III.5
(2) Epicurus. The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Trans. Inwood and Gerson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
(3) “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work – as a human being… Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?” — Aurelius, Meditations V.1
(4) “our brains developed out of nature...and the architecture of our brains was born from the same trial and error, the same energy particles, the same pure mathematics that happen in flowers and jellyfish...it is nonsensical to ask why we find nature beautiful. We are not observers on the outside looking in. We are on the inside too.” — Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe 83.
(5) “even the by-products of natural processes have a certain charm and attractiveness. Bread, for instance, in the course of its baking, tends to crack open here and there, and yet these very cracks, which are, in a sense, offences against the baker’s art, somehow appeal to us and, in a curious way, promote our appetite for the food....the fact that they follow from natural processes gives them an added beauty and makes them attractive to us.” — Aurelius, Meditations. III.2
(6) Aurelius, Meditations. IV.3 and X.6
(7) “So we need to hurry. Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding – our grasp of the world – may be gone before we get there.” — Aurelius, Meditations III.1
(8) “There's no reason in being alive if you're not happy. Don't be one of those people that walks around miserable, hating their life. You can change anything about your life that you don't like.” — Anthony Green
Works Cited
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Trans. Hays. New York: Modern Library, 2002.Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. 3rd ed. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, Publishers, 2004.
Epictetus. Discourses, Fragments, Handbook. Trans. Hard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Epicurus. The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Trans. Inwood and Gerson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
Lightman, Alan P. The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew. New York: Vintage, 2013.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. New York: Random House, 2005.
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