Building a framework of living # 3: Follow the advice from stoics
Arun Kumar
There are two basic facts for all living things including me and you — we are mortal and that once here, we have to live. Whichever way we choose to live, live we should.
Mortality, or impermanence, is a universal trait. It permeates the physical as well as our psychological landscape.
Rocks that look so permanent, over time slowly get eroded by wind and water and turn into white grains of sand.
Stars are born, get consumed inside out, explode as supernovae to illuminate the night sky one more time and then fade away. In the end, we all give our atoms we borrowed back to the universe and entropy has the upper hand.
Within a blink of an eye, our thoughts wander away and the monkey brain rules.
Granted everything is impermanent, perhaps a unique aspect of us is that we also have the capacity to be aware of our mortality.
To make living more interesting, somewhere along the evolutionary journey, together with the gift of consciousness, we also acquired the capacity to be aware of the future. The concept of the future goes hand in hand with our capacity of consciousness.
The awareness of mortality, together with the consequences related to our knowledge that the future exists, and further, it is uncertain, have been far reaching in all aspects of society.
Perhaps the gift of consciousness is balanced by the curse of being aware that there is a future, and further, it is uncertain. Guess there is no free lunch.
With the notion of the future, we also acquired the capability to keep track of time. We developed calendars and institutionalized the notion of when we were born, how many days we have lived, what is the expected life expectancy (to give us a sense of how many more days we may live). All aspects of keeping track of time only adds to our sense of being mortal, if nothing else, then perhaps subliminally.
The notion of the future, its fogginess, and the way our lives can be upended by unseemingly random events, led us to also invent a whole range of enterprises — astrology, palmistry, reading tea leaves, picking flowers petals and saying they love me, they love me not, searching for a four leaf clover to brighten our day — for foretelling the future and anticipating our destinies; religions to dampen the feeling of vulnerability the thought of future can entice.
Invent as we may, the fact remains that for some of us we have to find a path that brings two congruent facts — our awareness of mortality and the act of living — coexist in harmony. It could take years of struggle and exploration, but once our receptors of mortality become active, there is no other choice.
We have to find a way and in quest for that, the two very basic choices we have are either to change mortality or to change how we live.
We cannot do much about mortality other than eating well, exercising to increase our life and health span. Knowing we can change mortality, sweating over it is not going to help. Mortality is there to stay. At least for now, despair as we may, mortality shall exist forever.
Mortality is a rock that sits in the path of a river. What is in our hands is to accept its presence and to flow around it.
What we can change is how we live. The choices we make for living are in our control. And in there — how to live — we have to search of our path to bring the two into harmony,
This is also the advice that stoics give — recognize the dichotomy of control. There are things we cannot control, and then there are things we can control (and hence, can change). There is no need to waste our limited mental and physical resources on things we cannot control and change. It is the same sentiment that later got expressed in the Serenity Prayer.
In the end, by making right choices for living, choices that blend with our innate nature and our values, we could have a fulfilling life. It is then mortality, and the act of living, can coexist in harmony.
It is only with the acceptance that the river acknowledges the presence of the seemingly impermanent rock in its path and finds a way to gently flow around it.
The bottom line, however, is that at the beginning of the quest to bring two of them together, we need to introspect and figure out for ourselves what makes for a fulfilling life. We need to walk over the hot coals and emerge on the other side with hopes to live an equanimous life.
Ciao.
Summary:
1. We are mortal once here, we have to live.
2. A unique aspect of us is that we also have the capacity to be aware of our mortality.
3. We have to find a path that brings two congruent facts — our awareness of 4. mortality and the act of living — coexist in harmony.
5. To find that path, we can change one out of two things — mortality or living.
6. Changing how we live is in our control; changing mortality is not.
In the end, by making right choices for living we can hope to bring mortality and living in harmonious coexistence.
Related:
Building a framework for living #1: Becoming aware of mortality
Building a framework for living #2: The basic premise for its need
