Another month has gone by . . .
Another month has gone by and as is my wont, another post sneaks in. I read posts from The Daily Stoic and in light of todays world, these words make a lot of sense. Nothing really has changed in our world except the packaging.
In December 1950, the United States was deep into the war in Korea. It seemed likely that the conflict would spiral out of control. What would happen next? What could one do? Was it hopeless? Whose fault was it? As Secretary of State, Dean Aiken struggled under this burden. He got a letter from his old friend, the foreign policy visionary George Keenan. It’s advice that bucks you up whether you’re fighting for the future of the free world, or just trying to make it through high school. And here it is:
We’ve talked before about this kind of paradox in stoicism. The stoics were boldly optimistic and ruthlessly pragmatic. They always believed that they could endure the worst circumstances and they accepted the brutal facts of those circumstances. They saw the unquestionable major disaster and the unprecedented major opportunity.
As Ryan Holiday writes in Lives of the Stoics (which you can pick up at The Daily Stoic Store), Xeno loses his entire fortune in a shipwreck. But by bearing this with grace and fortitude, he was able to discover a philosophy that changed the world. Marcus was the leader of Rome through a series of crises that matched Truman’s: a war and a 15-year pandemic. Cato faced a republic on the brink of collapse. Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Agrippinus, Rutilius, and Helvidius, all were exiled.
These were difficult moments, but they bore them well with competence, dignity, candor, most of all unflappable perseverance. They might have temporarily bemoaned it, but they knew, as Epictetus knew, that becoming an Olympic class athlete takes sweat. So they stuck to it, just as you must.
That was fantastic
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