Life beyond the shadows
... and encouragement from the Stoics
Early this year, on impulse, I added an unknown book to an online order. Unlike some of my other impulse purchases, it turned out to have been a good decision and it brought me into relationship with a discipline that’s had a significant impact on me. Not so much that it’s changed my life. After all, as my physician recently reminded me in response to a raised concern, I’m old. (I did not thank her for that unhelpful, albeit perceptive, response.) It’s probably far too late for me to drastically change anything anyway. But it is not at all too late to understand myself better. To peer into the past and explore how I got here and became the person I am. What and who supported my growth, introduced new ideas, and encouraged me to explore and colour outside the lines? And what was it that circumscribed my development or irrevocably changed my course? What myriad interweaving of cosmic dust motes invited this configuration of me to emerge right here at this very moment in time?
So, when Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living arrived, I boldly jumped in, determined to start AND CONTINUE (not a habitual strong point) a practice that would support my transition from work to retirement, from who I have been to who I can yet become. I did. I have. And I’ll likely never finish.
Each day, Holiday opens with a reading from one of the Stoic philosophers, chiefly Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. Aurelius, I learned, hadn’t been the brilliant author of emergent philosophy. Rather, he collected snippets of wisdom from his own reading and things learned from other leaders, orators, and contemporaries. It seems he was intent on reminding himself how to live well by copying out the words of others he believed were doing so or who were providing inspiration for the struggle. Seeing him as someone in the process of learning, failing, reorienting himself, and trying again made the whole effort seem so much more possible for mere mortals like me.
Don’t we all wonder how we got to where we are? I’m told that, no, most people don’t choose to do this kind of work. I find this utterly confusing even as I balk at the prospect of doing it myself. We have one life. Every second comes and goes and never comes again. In the midst of all the stuff and nonsense of everyday life, we can forget to appreciate the meaning, beauty, and awe in those everyday experiences and remind ourselves to savour them. Yet wrapped deep in the muck of that same everyday, we also weave an invisible forgetting, sealing off the pain, loss, sorrow, and guilt that lies underneath the times made beautiful by the people and places we love. There, silent, lie those other times, added to by the ones we still hope might slowly settle through the sieve of the day-to-day to rest quietly among them in the dormant recesses of “maybe it never happened.”
Perhaps I am only able to do this now that I am not working, not having to manage the details of a responsible schedule. I know I’ve tried to establish such a discipline before, beginning with Kahlil Gibran diaries in the mid-70s and into which I wrote poetry, protectively signed “emmy”1 to protect me from embarrassment should anyone find the books. Each morning, I now reach for Holiday’s book as soon as I awake, read the entry, muse for a bit, and then write. So far, it has been a consistent practice excepting a very, very few days. It’s been illuminating and has invited me to explore - with honed intention - the myriad realities that have formed me, the things I might have learned, early on, that would have made so much difference.
Much of what formed me was physical, the space in which I was growing up and the internal struggle of dealing with the vulnerabilities of my own body. Illness has been a persistent companion from an early age (including 35 years of undiagnosed almost-every-other-day migraines), the variety of ailments dealt with as distractions I had to manage, live with, or outwit. But delving intentionally into the realm of my emotional formation, my sense of security, why I am bold in some places and silent in others … that is a different work and one I had neither information nor courage enough to explore deeply despite having long lamented its reality. Not having done so has been costly. Acting in certain, ofttimes repetitive ways without knowledge of why we choose to do so is always costly. And that, of course, is why ignorance is such bliss. If we don’t look, we don’t see, if we don’t see, we are safe. Or so we think.
No matter how delicious you may find it, I am not planning to turn this blog into a regular exposé of my life. There are simply too many accomplices from which I would need to extract permissions! That said, I’ve long appreciated the thought behind the quote “If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”2 I promise to be as truthful as one’s own perspective on their life can possibly be, interpretation in such matters is necessarily one-sided. If we’re related, you may wish to stop right here, the differences in our perspectives already hard-lined. I’ve no need to destabilize anyone’s world and others will have seen my reality through different eyes, remembering things from a different corner of the room, the channels through which I’ve recorded them sounding as though tuned slightly, if not entirely, off the true.
I write trusting that your reading even this far is promise of a willingness to open your heart to the struggle of understanding, the pain of recognition, and the belief that strength can yet show up, even if its arrival seems torturously far off. And I write because these discernments, these lessons from the edge of the cliff are, doubtless, not solely my own.
Really just the written out version of the first letter of my first name, Margaret, now shortened to ‘gretta’. I use a variation of it now when I don’t want the animosity provoked by my work to follow me into the world of voluntarism. I’ll add something from one of those books when I can lay my hand on them.
Attributed to author Catherine Aird and found in her 1973 novel, His Burial Too, the quote is also often connected in a slightly different version to serial killer Aileen Wuornos, for whom it would be a fitting epitaph, her life devastatingly shot through, beginning to end-by-execution, with tragedy and horror.
Thank you Gretta. Wow, this is becoming really rich. I think I have more to say, but I need to ponder... again, thank you.
Yes, retirement is very good to continue to be who you can yet become. It has been a very fruitful time for me. I have dealt with some ‘stuff’ and have shed 40 kg. Now a size 12 jeans no longer 26!