Bro-icsm? Broism? Stoicism?
It's about more than self-evolution; isn't it?
I told one of my friends that I was looking at a lot of stoicism blogs lately. She snorted, raised an eyebrow and watched as her dog sniffed a sexy bush near the old, brick electric building and said, “Well, that’s super bro of you.”
“Wait. What? You mean Stoicism is actually bro-icism?” I asked.
“It is now.”
“Wait, if I’m kind of into it, does that mean I’m a bro?”
“Absolutely.” She laughed but I think she meant it. Then she must have had pity on me because she said, “No. You’re not a bro-ic. You care too much about your community to be a bro-ic. You’re more a true Stoic.”
We continued our walk around our little Maine town and I gave it some thought. I had a philosophy professor in college who listened to a lot of Indigo Girls but also was always talking about the Sstoics. He was a pretty manly guy in a typical I’m-a-college-professor-trying-to-be-tougher way. He drank beer at the local bar. He had hunting dogs.
He was kind of an early bro if you took out the Indigo Girls part.
And recently, it seems like a lot of blogs and life hacks and guys making a lot of money telling us how to live our lives are talking about stoicism.
Philosophy professor Nancy Sherman calls it “a sort of athletic training for the soul.”
She writes:
“Founded in the third century B.C.E. by the Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium and mainly associated today with Roman practitioners like the emperor Marcus Aurelius and the statesman Seneca, Stoicism stresses ethics, virtue and the attainment of that elusive good life.
“But today, Stoicism is not so much a philosophy as a collection of life hacks for overcoming anxiety, meditations for curbing anger, exercises for finding stillness and calm — not through “oms” or silent retreats but through discourse that chastens a mind: “The pain isn’t due to the thing itself,” says Marcus Aurelius, “but to your estimate of it.” In this mind-set, the impact of the outer world can fade away as the inner self becomes a sanctuary. The focus narrows to that self — me, isolated from the social structures that support me or bring me down.
“This may be one strand of Stoicism, hyperbolized in the much-quoted epigrams of the Greek Stoic Epictetus, but it is by no means the whole of it. The me-focused view misses ancient Stoicism’s emphasis on our flourishing as social selves, connected locally and globally.”
That’s so interesting to me because pop culture and a world of 140-character conversations can take even the most complex things and thin it down, right? But Stoicism (like most philosophy and psychology) is deeper than that. Stoics are about achieving their potential and then also using that potential in harmony with a collective good.
It’s kind of what the United States was always supposed to be about.
How can that not be appealing?
She writes,
“We learned about Stoics like Hierocles, a lesser-known second-century Roman philosopher, who offered a concrete exercise for building the kind of connectivity that Marcus Aurelius was after: Draw concentric circles around a point — the self — and then extend the circles from kith and kin to the whole of humanity. Then shrink the space between the circles, Hierocles writes, “zealously transferring” those from the outside to the inside. It’s the task of a good person, he says, to adopt this initiative, to make this moral commitment.”
How beautiful is that? Make the circles smaller. Don’t use Stoicism as a wall against the sound and troubles of the world, but as a way to be strong enough to help change it, to be more than your opinions and biases, but part of rational thought, processed opinions, rather than the rage-tweets and quick reactions to trolls.
In Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius (Letter 16), he writes,
“Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping-point. The false has no limits. When you are travelling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless. Recall your steps, therefore, from idle things, and when you would know whether that which you seek is based upon a natural or upon a misleading desire, consider whether it can stop at any definite point. If you find, after having travelled far, that there is a more distant goal always in view, you may be sure that this condition is contrary to nature.”
The false has no limits, no end. But truth? That’s another road entirely. Honestly, I’m okay if I’m delving into Stoicism via the world of bros, and I’m glad they’re delving too. Because isn’t it better to delve into philosophy than to wander astray, hopelessly, constantly, contrarily?
BE BRAVE FRIDAY
Not Worrying About The Dog Fur On The Stairs: My Baby Epiphany About How I’m Trapping Myself
Sometimes you know that your life is a prison, but you can’t figure out why. Maybe something has made you trapped — responsibility, bad health, a pandemic, bad weather, anxiety.
That’s how I felt on Thursday when Shaun told me that the housing inspector was coming to our home that we live in, which also has a vacation rental permit for the years where I don’t make enough to make me feel safe enough to not rush off and live in a camper to rent our house to strangers.
That’s not happening this year. It hasn’t happened for a couple of years, but it lurks over me. A threat. A possibility I could return to only now there are two dogs, four cats, a snake, a kid, a husband.
So, when he said the inspector was coming to check on things — a totally nice guy — I panicked. And I felt trapped. There was no escape. I had a bunch of deadlines and a house that wasn’t perfect.
“The house is a sty,” I yelled.
“Baby girl, the house is not a sty.”
“A pig pen!”
“Baby girl — ”
“There is dust on the stairs. There is a paper towel on the counter. There is a ripped blanket on the sofa! I need to clean the toilets!”
“He is not going to look in the toil — ”
“Oh my banana bread! The kitty litter boxes!” Full disclosure: I did not yell “banana bread.” I yelled something else.
I frantically cleaned, mumbling, “It’s a mess. It’s a sty. It’s a mess.”
And Shaun said, “Baby, nobody would think this house is a sty but you.”
“I am slovenly!”
“No. No, you aren’t slovenly.” He stressed the word like he thought it was funny and then saw my glare apparently and paused. “Is that what matters? That you feel slovenly?”
Yes. Yes, it was. I felt like a slob and I needed to escape that feeling. I felt like I’d been too busy working and living and going biking with Em who was home for the week to notice the dust on the stairs. To be fair, it wasn’t dust. It was dog and cat fur that decides every day to collect like tumble weed and sit in wait on the stairs.
I grew up in a family where we cleaned as a family every Saturday and put away laundry and dishes and clutter every single day. Beds were made. Pillows fluffed. Clothes did not wait like Shaun’s shorts do, folded on top of the dresser. They were in the drawer. I am a relic of this past, of making sure that even though we weren’t rich, we weren’t filth. Those moments of control over our house’s cleanliness were sometimes the only bits of control we had.
My house would not have met my family’s inspection. I had a tea mug on my desk, for banana bread’s sake. The shed in the back has some sort of green stuff growing on it. Pollen maybe? Dirtying the sides.
The inspector came over. He did not lift up the toilet seats. And when he was gone, Shaun said, “He said we had a really nice house four times.”
“He did not.”
“He did.”
“You’re lying to make me feel better.”
“I swear. Four times.”
“You counted?”
“Of course.”
Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate what we have, you know? Sometimes, it’s really easy to slip into a space where you worry about being judged even by super nice people. Sometimes, it’s hard to move past the things that cut so quick and so deep — like being pretty poor in a town full of pretty rich.
My town is like that now, too. On my way back from a chamber event, I stopped and talked to a couple people who were running for office. There were funny and kind. They worked hard. One talked about all her jobs, about hoping to find a new room to live in, about hoping that soon seasonal workers wouldn’t have to crash in their cars and that more year round workers could find year round places, too. I fell instantly in love with both of them.
Today, I took a break in work to scrub at the pollen (or whatever) that was on the fence, on the shed in my backyard. I have pretty wimpy hands, so they ache about this sort of thing pretty quickly.
But I realized just then just how lucky I was to have a house, about how excited both of those cool women could potentially be to have a shed to wash, to have a place to call their own, to have that housing stability where you didn’t have to worry about a landlord. But also, how grateful I am that they have someplace at least. But damn, I want them to have somewhere better. I want them to be able to freak out about their house being too something or other. I want them to be able to paint walls, to make plans and improvements if they want — to have that stability if they want. Housing insecurity is big and it’s real and as property taxes increase, it’s happening to people on fixed incomes, too, or people like me who don’t have a set salary, who wonder if they’ll have to take off to a campground or a boat or a tent or something in the summer to make ends meet.
My house is not a prison. My house is a gift and a blessing that I worked really hard for and that I have to appreciate while I have it. What was a prison was my way of looking at it. I made that prison. Me. And I’m feeling that way about the painting below (that negative way), but I’m trying to push past that and post this anyway.
So, here’s to finding security when it comes to shelter and it comes to our own brains, and to breaking free from those prisons we construct for ourselves.
My real blogs are here and here.
A COOL LINK I REFERENCED
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opinion/stoics-self-help.html
POSTS FROM LAST WEEK
