Life According to Howl's Moving Castle
Plus a huge announcement
Are you exceptional―or exceptionally plain? Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle, a 2004 modern classic by the anime studio Studio Ghibli, fully accepted the notion of her being a homely young lady. Not particularly beautiful or cause to turn heads (so she tells herself). We meet this young girl working diligently in her late father’s hat shop, surrounded by gaudy women caked in makeup, reinforcing daily the idea that Sophie is bound to be an old spinster or cat lady.
Sophie, sadly, seems to have accepted this as reality. That is, until a rather stunning young man called Howl comes along. Howl takes an interest in Sophie. When Sophie is visited by a vengeful witch, the Witch of the Waste, who longs for Howl’s affection, she is cursed.
Sophie awakens the next morning, and she is old. Her skin is withered, and her back aches. Sophie’s knees tremble and work overtime to keep her up. She is now, in reality, as frail and unremarkable as she’d come to believe. While Sophie is horrified at first, you can tell that she plays the part of an old maid quite well.
Sophie was always what we might call “an old soul”.
Her focus quite literally becomes her physical reality.
This is so common. Almost all of us know someone who has internalized a pitiful, self-deprcating, or false idea of who they are and what they’re capable of.
The co-worker who does everything right but lacks the esteem necessary to advocate for a raise based on pure merit.
The girl in class who hinges her entire sense of beauty and self-worth on the validation she does or does not receive at home.
The nerdy bookworm guy who is convinced the popular girl would only ever date a prototypical jock or “chad”. Peter Parker, if you will.
Stoicism as a philosophy is almost entirely rooted in the selection of your “glasses” by which you view the world. Glass half-empty or glass half-full kind of stuff. Things happen to us out in the world, and we’re left with a mental impression of them, what the Stoics called phantasia in Greek.
These are the things that have objectively occurred (phantasia)
The car is totaled. You’ve developed a food allergy. You lost your job. A parent has died. Yes, they happened, but next, the Stoic chooses the frames by which he understands the event. This is hypolepsis.
"Men are not angered but mere misfortune, but by misfortune conceived as injury," wrote C.S. Lewis, one of many Stoic-tinged insights nestled within The Screwtape Letters.
It’s almost beat for beat a recreation of Marcus Aurelius’s “Choose not to be harmed - and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed - and you haven't been.”
What Sophie must learn over the course of Howl’s Moving Castle is a variation of this same insight, that being old is not really a curse. It’s just a different way of experiencing the world. Some of the trappings of youth are stripped away. Howl suffers throughout the movie from a terror of aging and losing his youthful face. His vanity makes him mildly monstrous at times.
Yesterday I was looking in the mirror and observing the fresh lines and contours of my face that weren’t there a few years ago. The differences are subtle.
I like what I see in the mirror more than I used to, honestly.
I’m only 35, but my back does hurt often. I’ve developed tennis elbow in my right arm, and it has stung every day for a few months now. I struggle to lift a coffee cup on bad days.
Still, I’ve never been more comfortable in my own skin. There are other things I value more than my ability to throw a baseball.
My God, I remember when I was 14 and my Dad’s shoulder could no longer accommodate playing catch. That was like yesterday. He was so happy when he finally had surgery done and talked about being able to throw a ball again. I think neither of us realized at the time that all his kids were now grown and out of the house. Play catch with who?
Time is like that. Don’t waste a minute of it.
I digress.
This post came about when my daughter joined me in my office for a brainstorming session on content. I needed some fresh ideas for stories about focus and reality. She loves the Ghibli movies of Hayao Miyazaki and wrote down this anecdote about Sophie and Howl. When I watched the movie myself, and it had been over a decade since I last saw it, I was excited to share a few of these takeaways with you all.
Good morning, Geeky Stoics! I just returned from a week-long vacation in the Seattle area. My family and I hiked Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and bummed around Forks, Washington, where the Twilight books are set. It was a great time. Upon returning, there was some exciting news to share, which we’d hinted at in recent weeks.
We’re doing a book! It was announced yesterday by Post Hill Press and is due out in 2026. Your Focus Determines Your Reality is going to be….a reality.
This is where the fun begins. Over the next few months, we’ll be hard at work on this book and bouncing ideas off all of you on subscribed to the Geeky Stoics newsletter.
Paid Subscribers will get some sneak peeks into the writing process and an opportunity to help shape the final product. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now is a great time to do it.