penfist

stories are the bones of everything

Essays

Circle of control

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“We control our reasoned choice and all acts that depend on that moral will. What’s not under our control are the body and any of its parts, our possessions, parents, siblings, children, or country—anything with which we might associate.”
—Epictetus, Discourses

I am in my mid-40s at the time I am writing this. My body is failing. That’s not to say the expiration date is near, but merely that I am hyperaware of the amount of wear and tear I have put on the machine. Military service in two different branches and a mobile lifestyle have taken a toll. I do not control my body’s reaction to this excessive wear and tear, but I do control my mind, and how it responds.

Our mind is the only thing, ultimately, that we do have control over, if we are fortunate enough to have a healthy brain. The lesson for myself, and anyone who chooses to read these words, is this: stop worrying about externality. Make choices that will keep your brain as healthy as possible. Let go of things you have zero influence over. News. Elections. The health of your national currency. What someone else thinks of you. It’s all quite irrelevant.

If you choose to engage with people on social media, remember that you don’t control what they think, and should therefore not become invested in those who have a different opinion than you. Express yourself, move on, and let go.

It was very icy this morning when I left the house, and even though I have all wheel drive, I found myself unable to make turns. Instead, I was sliding in straight lines across sheets of ice. I could easily have wrecked my expensive automobile. I realized that I couldn’t control the ice, or the way my car responded to it. Instead of getting upset, I crept home as slowly and carefully as I could. I made it safely, and for that I am grateful.

If I hadn’t, and had wrecked my car, I would focused on seeing the positives. My automobile has been great in the five years I’ve had it, but I am not attached to it. It’s just a tool that gets me where I want to go. My body is the exact same thing. A tool that gets my mind where I’d like it to go. In the realization of this, I am cognizant that I should try to take care of my car and my body, but that eventually, they will both fail me.

In the mean time, I’m focused on what’s really important – the choices I’m making, the habits I am forming, and the ideas I am exploring. Those are the only things that will matter when my existence is drawing to its close.

My circle of control is what’s happening inside my head. That’s the place that matters most, and what I do there will influence everything else. The same applies to you.

Harmless indulgences

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“We must give up many things to which we are addicted, considering them to be good. Otherwise, courage will vanish, which should continually test itself. Greatness of soul will be lost, which can’t stand out unless it disdains as petty what the mob regards as most desirable.”
— Seneca, Moral Letters

I spend a great deal of time thinking about the way I spend the majority of my time. I carry a set of unwritten rules around with me wherever I go. Like the one where I don’t install any games on my phone. I know me. If I had games on my phone, I would play them to distract myself from more important, but less pleasurable tasks, like writing this. Another rule I have, and this one is new, is that if any app on my phone sends me an alert more than three times a day, it gets notifications disabled. This is relatively easy to do on an Android phone. I’m not going to allow my phone to control my attention span.

I know myself. I am a procrastinator. If I don’t block out time for what truly matters, I won’t do the things that truly matter. Modern life offers us thousands of activities and substances that we can become addicted to. Whether you spend several hours a day playing Farmville, or looking to score your next hit of whatever it is that gets you high the way you like, maybe it’s time to reconsider the amount of time and energy you’re giving away. It’s impossible to grow when you aren’t blocking out time to think about what meaningful growth looks like to you.

For me, meaningful growth involves contemplating my reality and creating stories and narratives about the past, present and imagined future. To do that, I need to limit the things that take away from writing time. Like my phone buzzing to demand my attention.

If something is taking you away from what you love most, consider limiting its access to you, or your access to it. If that thing, substance or person is truly keeping you from doing what you really love, you may even need to banish the whatever it is completely.

All of this assumes you know what you really want from life, and that you’re willing to fight to have it. If neither of those things is true I hope you do find a calling and become willing to give up all the petty addictions in order to accomplish it. The more I contemplate my life, the more I realize that many things I’ve thought of in the past as harmless indulgences probably aren’t. I’m more and more willing and able to tune out and push out the things and people who don’t add any real value.

Be ruthless to the things that don’t matter

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“How many have laid waste to your life when you weren’t aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusements — how little of your own was left to you. You will realize you are dying before your time!”

— Seneca, On the Brevity of Life

Learning to say no has been a real journey for me. I was programmed at an early age to please others. That’s the easy way. I choose the harder way. I’ve been practicing saying no for several decades. It gets easier as I practice.

I’m going into 2017 with several goals in mind. One of them, and this one runs across years and decades, is to become a bit more thoughtful. I want to grow my mental real estate. Practicing saying no is a huge part of that. There are so many distractions. So many people who would love to waste my time, energy, and finances with ‘stuff’ that I will ultimately find unfulfilling and of little value. I might enjoy some of the things I’m offered in the moment, and that’s not a sin. However, if I reach the end of my life only to realize that I haven’t used my time wisely, I believe that I will die an unforgiven sinner. I believe I’ll have regrets at the end. When it’s too late to change the story.

There are 8,760 hours in this year. Some of them are already gone. I’ve spent some of them thinking about finishing my debut novel, a few pecking at the keys and searching for the words. I’m spent some of them thinking about my health. I’ve spent a lot of them reading about the way the Stoics approached life. I’m committed to the things that matter this year. Personal mental growth, storytelling, and being a thoughtful partner are my top three priorities.

I’m not arrogant enough to believe I matter that much to very many people. I’m not sure I’d want the burdens that go along with celebrity. However, if you choose to join me for a few moments or hours during the coming year, either as a reader, friend or casual stranger who arrives by accident of circumstance, I hope you’ll take the time to stop what you’re doing and give the idea that ruthlessness can be a good thing some of your mental real estate.

Learning how to say no is a critical skill. Learning the value of your time, which is actually the currency of your life, is paramount to making the journey worthwhile. It is your life and I hope you will live it like you matter. Wishing you a thoughtful and joyous 2017.

Be ruthless to the things that don’t matter.

Self-control and externality

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“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

To my friends who may be worried about the future. You have more power than you know. The incoming orange president has only the power you are willing to give him. Be not afraid but rather draw your tribe closer around you and remember that whatever happens you are the only one in charge of your mind. Donald J. Trump once said that “what separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.” He’s exactly right, even if he isn’t approaching life from a stoic point of view.

You are in charge of yourself and that’s enough to make of life exactly what you want to make of it. No one but you is in control of your own operating system.

The world you inhabit isn’t about anyone you don’t choose to include in it. This may sound complicated, but it is only as complicated as you make it. Even if you’re incarcerated, you are in control of your mind, and that’s the part of you where reality happens.

The ancient Greeks who came up with the philosophy of Stoicism didn’t know as much as we do about the nature of the universe. They might have known more than we 21st century denizens know about living the good life. They believed in understanding and then facing the obstacles life threw at them. Epictetus, one of the most prominent Stoics, was born a slave. He believed that everything good in our lives starts within ourselves. In his way of seeing the world, nothing external can make us feel anything, and it is only what we tell ourselves about the world around us that results in our emotional reactions.

For my readers, many of whom are also my friends, I give you these principles to contemplate:

  1. Acknowledge that all emotions come from within
  2. Find someone you respect, and use them to stay honest
  3. Understand that failure is the path to growth and later triumphs
  4. Read with purpose
  5. Learn to be brutally honest, starting with yourself
  6. Understand what you spend most of your time doing, and understand what value is returned
  7. Use that knowledge to avoid procrastination
  8. Be present in the present
  9. Remember that time is the most valuable finite resource you have

Source of this list

In 2017, I intend to write weekly on this website about the Stoic philosophy, and what I’m learning from exploring it. I hope you will join me. Let’s grow together as we explore the wisdom of the past to exert the self-control that is fundamental to growth and success in life.

That pesky little Constitution

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Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

Flags. Those symbols of what we think we are and what we’d like everyone around us to be. There are lots of problems with president elect Trump telling us that burning the flag should be a crime. First, the Supreme Court has already decided that burning the U.S. flag is not a crime. It is a form of legally protected free speech. Google United States v. Eichman. It is also illegal to use loss of citizenship as a form of criminal punishment.

Flags are not people. They represent ideas. Ideas cannot be burned, so burning a symbol is merely expressing dissatisfaction with the idea or ideas that symbol currently represents. In this case, the U.S. flag currently represents Donald J. Trump. Therefore what Trump is saying is that it should be illegal to protest the upcoming rule of Donald J. Trump.

Human rights matter. Flags do not. But don’t for one second think that Trump as President of these United States will let that pesky Constitution get in the way of promoting his brand or exercising the power less than half the people of this country have voted to give him. Trump is dangerous precisely because

I’m not going to burn any flags, but I do want to say something to Trump. No thank you. I’m not interested in being led by those who grab pussy nonconsensually. From my perspective, that’s much more offensive than burning a flag that was probably not even manufactured in the USA.

I’m actively against everything you stand for. You don’t have any legal authority to change the law. That’s the job of Congress. I suggest that instead of wasting your time on Twitter, you start planning all the ways you will keep this country from devolving into civil war.

People burning flags is the very least of your problems. Get off Twitter, shut your mouth, and start listening to the people burning the flags. By doing that, there’s a slim chance you can make America great for the first time in history.

Othered

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You’ll have to take it on faith when I tell you that I understand how a coward thinks. I used to get beat up after school. Not because I was a coward. Mostly, I think, it happened because words matter.

I had so many to choose from, and I loved that.

I love that fact still.

The coward’s way is the ability to stop listening. To filter out the voices that disagree. The ones that offer another perspective.

The ones that are smarter than I am. They are better at othering than I am.

It’s all scalable. I’m not, by any measure, the smartest one. I hope only to be among those found, by the measure of history, to be one of the ones most able to listen.

I probably won’t matter enough for history to notice, but that’s most of us. That’s the 99%. I love them, and I wouldn’t mind being relegated into their tribe.

I was only human.

It is why I unblocked every single person I’d ever blocked recently. We all have a voice, and I want to take every one I have the time for into consideration. If this is a popularity contest, and it is, then I need to figure out how a spray tan man took the highest office in the land. Then I need to figure out how to end his reign.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. And everything else that has been observed by the weak who refused to give away their power.

Be the change you want to see in the world. Refuse to filter out that with which you cannot stomach. You will grow stronger. As a coward who wishes to grow into some other state of being, I can tell you from long experience that scars are not shame. Wear them proudly.

Write down the names of your enemies. Burn them in effigy. Join your tribe with that of another and rejoice. The weak ones always win when they band together and make demands.

We can do that. If we overcome the fear.

I will not allow my weakness to be my master. Not should you. Study your enemies. Invite them into you house. Tell your tribe to keep their knives sharpened and their eyes and ears always open.

We win because we are legion and they are cowards more craven than we.

I will fight. Will you be my tribe?

I won’t other you. I won’t let them other you. I won’t take your humanity away just because we’re different. You can be my tribe, if you learn to listen.

Tear down the wall, or just refuse them the power to build it.