Happy Monday! It’s a new week. I’m on vacation in/around Seattle for the next 7 days, so I’ll be publishing a bit less. If you have any insight into making the most of Olympic National Park, Mount Rainer, and Mount St. Helens, please send it along! My family could use some hiking recommendations. Before I go and get packed, I wanted to share some of my favorite tidbits of wisdom with you that made it into my notebook this week + some brief reflections.
The first is brand new and came to me yesterday when I needed it most.
“Don’t allow grieving what you’ve lost to forsake what you’ve been given.”
- Pastor Amy Farley, River Church Vietnam
Yesterday was off to a bad start. I am glad I went to church.
Pastor Farley visited us from her ministry in Vietnam, and she shared her experiences grappling with the worst kind of evil and personal turmoil. She’d lost a piece of herself on her last mission in Africa, more so, it was taken from her by two men who violently abducted Amy. She was attacked, raped, and tortured, and survived only by making a daring escape into the night.
“It feels like evil is winning,” is what she wrote to her community in a grim email in the months to follow. We’re constantly slipping, trying to outrun the dark as it grasps for our heels. Comparison of pain is always a losing game, but Amy’s story broke me down, and I cried hard in service over the death of Dad. I’m still angry. I’m still sad. It turns out that most days, I am not “over it”, I’m just not looking it in the face.
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What Pastor Farley spoke of is exactly what J.R.R. Tolkien called “Eucatastrophe” in his essay On Fairy Stories. An anti-doomsday, a silver lining, a redemption of evil and death. Amy looked back on the evil that had been done to her and said the unthinkable: that if she could undo that night, she wouldn’t. This must be why so many stories are about heroes who suffer tragedy and get the opportunity to rewrite the past (for a high price, of course). It’s what we’re all itching to do with our pain.
There are no redos, so we can’t rewrite it. But if we could, we mustn’t.
“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
- Gandalf (Return of the King)
Before I went to bed last night, I took a peek at Facebook (always a mistake). A friend posted, “What’s your opinion of Gaza/Israel?” I could see there were 300 comments. That was my cue to hit the X button and close the tab. I care about this thing, I am not indifferent, but commenting is not the same as caring. I am indifferent to discussions of the issue. Indifference is a tricky thing to manage. It can turn toxic and cold, but there’s nothing particularly righteous about demonstrating care while neglecting duties within your purview.
The Lord of the Rings is crystal clear about the reality of gargantuan struggles between good and evil in our world. You would be mistaken, however, if you took Tolkien as a rallying cry to Google search for instances of evil and to grab your sword to go fight it. That is not it, folks.
Sometimes, the nature of doing tangible good is to simply manage your own realm with integrity — to tend to your own garden and pull weeds as they inevitably appear. Shore up the walls of the garden. Water it. Manage the garden through drought and through storms.
The generation after you will have its own bad weather, and that is not in your control. You can only control what you do today with that garden.
Don’t get lost in the metaphor. This isn’t about gardening. This is about your life, family, and community. The principle of “Spheres of Influence” and focusing less on the things outside of your control is a core pillar of Stoic philosophy; as such, it's something we come back to often on Geeky Stoics.
“It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have a wisdom deriving solely from his notebook. ‘Zeno said this’ ‘Cleanthes said that’. What have you said? Assume authority yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity.”
- Seneca, Letters From A Stoic
Yes, this one is meant to be a touch ironic. You’re reading 3 quotes to start your day. We love wisdom quotes. Who doesn’t?! They are like life rafts or care packages floating down from the sky in a war zone. We need wise sayings and truisms, but man cannot live on BrainyQuotes alone. Start speaking for yourself, and write down your insights on the art of living. Reading is vital, folks. It gives shape to feelings you have and can teach us words to describe events that we struggle to make sense of. Out of reading, you’ll pull quotable wisdom, but you’ll also strengthen your own muscles for rhetoric. Seneca goes on about this for a while. It’s quite funny, and he says many more cutting things about quote addiction.
The bottom line is: make your own and strive to speak for yourself.
Just because Marcus Aurelius said it, or C.S. Lewis, or Mark Twain, doesn’t mean it’s true. What do you hold to be true? Put it into words and write it down. Someone might quote it one day.
When I was in church listening to Pastor Amy speak about what happened to her and how she has worked to redeem that loss and her anger, these words came to me all on their own….
'There is no triumph in a world without trouble”
It’s probably quite close to something said by somebody else. But these words are still mine. And I wrote them down here, where I’m going to try and record my own maxims and sayings over the next year. I’d love it if you could join me in this and share some of yours in the comments.
And if you can’t comment, that means you should upgrade your support of Geeky Stoics!!!! We need you to keep this thing going and do more for the community here.
Other happenings and things worth reading
The Wardrobe Door has some solid info on the new Netflix ‘Narnia’ movie. Check out their report.
Our latest video on YouTube is up! It tackles Jordan Peterson and what to do when we fail.
Tomorrow we’ll have a full-length interview posted of
. This is a great post written by Parker about wisdom, and is highly worth a read.
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