Your Saturday Stoic Review — Week of May 30 - June 5
By -Edward Lance Lorilla
June 04, 2022
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PASSAGE OF THE WEEK:
Each of us needs to take the time to set our priorities straight and to understand our limits. What's the most important thing in our lives? What's the next most important thing? What are we going to say no to so we can focus on those things? What are we going to say no to (or yes to) in order to protect our personal happiness and peace?
The key isn't to always do more, more, more, but sometimes to do less so that we can do more of what we care most about.
"Buddha said the secret to happiness is to want less. This is really important… Want less. That's the basis of attachment. And the first noble law of buddhism is that life is suffering. The word in Sanskrit is Duhkha, which is really dissatisfaction. When you want more, all you do is increase your dissatisfaction. And the secret, to defeat that, it really comes down to wanting less."
"Our very word 'civilization' etymologically coming from 'cities'—no, that's not where knowledge comes from. The food we eat does not come from cities. The clothes we wear—those materials don't come out of the cities. Our life is shaped by people on the margins, people who are doing things we don't know how to do or where to do them. Whether it's the mongols, a tribal group in the jungle of the Amazon, I want people to see their place in the history of the world, their contribution to civilization, and what they have done for us."
WHAT RYAN HOLIDAY IS READING:
"Character is what you do when you think no one is looking—and in today's world, someone is always looking."
Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a pair of glasses you could put on that changed how you viewed anything and everything that happens. Well, the good news is that there is and it comes to us—no surprise—from the Stoics.
All you have to do, the Stoics said, is tell yourself that you could leave life at any moment. Memento Mori. Let the thought of your mortality**, Marcus Aurelius said, "determine what you do and say and think."
Would you rather be stuck in traffic or dead forever? Would you rather be attacked by trolls or your corpse attacked by maggots? Would you rather be sick or or stretched out on your literal deathbed? Alive or not?
Let's put this all in perspective. Let's see today as a gift. You get to live. Don't waste it.
**If you want to learn more about the history of memento mori, you can read this article. Or to learn about one of Ryan Holiday's daily memento mori practices, you can watch this video. And if you want your own physical reminder to create priority, humility, and appreciation for life, get the Memento Mori Calendar.
The Memento Mori Calendar has 4,160 dots, each dot representing a week of your life and each row representing 2 years of your life. By filling in the Memento Mori Calendar every week, you will not only see how much life you've already lived (or as Seneca says, how much you've already died), but also how much life you've (hopefully) got left.
And of course, none of those to-be-filled-in dots are guaranteed. Every day it is true: this could be your last day on this planet.
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