Stoicism is often summarized as the recognition of what is within our control and what isn’t, and focusing one’s energies on the things that can be controlled. You don’t control the weather; you control whether you dress appropriately for it. This is called the Dichotomy of Control. To some, it may appear elementary to the point of being insulting, but what I’ve found is that for others, it’s a revolutionary concept. No one in their life during times of struggle or maturation ever said such a thing. We don’t all get good advice or have even halfway-decent mentors growing up.
Another way to think of Stoicism 101 is what Epictetus popularized, which might have come from Chrisyphus and may have originated with Zeno of Citium, is the metaphor of the dog and the cart…..
“When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don’t want to, they will be compelled to follow what is destined.”
Life is the cart. You’re the dog. You can trot with it or be dragged. #inspiring?
Not very empowering by today’s standards. Our culture today lionizes ideas that suggest you should annihilate the cart. As Danyeryas Targaryan says in Game of Thrones, “I’m going to break the wheel” of power, not just stop it.
But the point of all this is to figure out a workable framework for you in dealing with daily frustrations in a healthy manner. I don’t recommend breaking the wheel or fighting the cart, but some people are wired to try and do big, nearly impossible things.
The world needs revolutionaries. They aren’t all bad. But 99 percent of you aren’t those people, and are most likely going to suffer through the mundane challenges of customer service, whiny children, and probing employers.
Good philosophy is actionable for any human being. Stoicism has elements of that good, practical philosophy you can find in Zen Buddhism and on the tip of the tongue for Jedi Masters in Star Wars, monks in Avatar: The Last Airbender, and wizards of Middle-earth.
You didn’t ask for this, but you can decide how you respond.
In the pages of Perelandra, the second book of C.S. Lewis’s serially underrated Space Trilogy, a man named Ransom is on the planet we know as Venus, encountering a goddess of sorts called “the Green lady”.
She is innocence embodied. Perelandra is unfallen, or untouched by sin as we know it on Earth. She is kind of naive and has a million questions to ask about even the most basic words and concepts that Ransom speaks of.
One passage jumped out at me recently that felt worth sharing, because it is a perfect encapsulation of Epictetus and the core Stoic insights into frustration and our response to it.
If you want to read all of it, here it is. I’ll summarize below.
Ransom is very annoyed by his conversations with the Green Lady. He talks of wanting to run his hands through his hair, smoke a cigarette to ease the stress, and bury his hands deep in his pockets. But on Perelandra, he has no smokes, and he is naked.
Ransom feels frustrated at the inability to communicate fluidly with this being, like dealing with a toddler who just asks “why” again and again.
But he is working through why he feels frustrated. The Green Lady does not view incomprehension as a burden, because she is actively learning and participates in the process.
“To her, the interruption is as natural as the fulfillment.”
Ransom is clogged up. He can’t breathe when he zeroes in on the frustration. He is rebelling against something, the very human inclination that resulted in the Fall to sin. He isn’t going with the flow, or jogging alongside the cart.
“But like a man who has a wound that hurts him in certain positions and who gradually leans to avoid those positions, Ransom learned not to make that inner gesture. His day became better and better as the hours passed.”
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius after him, remind us that events are neutral; it is only our judgments that make events feel like offenses.
Right now, my dog is whimpering. He wants to play with the tennis ball on the other side of the porch. It is annoying me. Should I bark at the dog, like I am a dog myself, or should I consider that this sweet little animal does not have the reason I have, and cannot help himself?
Obviously, it does me no good to be angry at the dog for being a dog.
Most of the summer, I had an injury in my arm from throwing that damn ball, as well as rock climbing. Tennis elbow, more or less. Like Ransom says of a man’s injury, you learn not to agitate it. I came up with other ways of lifting cups and moving my body. I’d sleep in different positions so as not to feel pain.
It took three or four months of peaceful cooperation with the fact that I am injured, for my body to heal. Trust me, I tried to muscle through it. That failed miserably. As of this month, I can do things again with my arm. As you age, you have to learn to do this. You can’t “break the wheel” of your bodily aches and pains. You have to move with them, accept them, and adapt.
You must. It’s not about allowing injustice and evil in the world, or being indifferent, though the Stoics might talk often of indifference. It’s about nature. Things are not as they “should be” in your imagined perfect world, and this is not Eden. You’ll need to trot along in most cases, and not assume malice or ill will from the pestering child, dog, or boss. You can choose to assume ignorance, innocence, or a nature different from your own.
And nature is not bad. God’s world is fallen, but it is good.
Learn to love it, even in the broken places.
“To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved, and the raging of the sea falls still around it” - Marcus Aurelius