I’ll tell you why. I lost my two precious children 2 years ago. Every day I live without them makes me wish I had thought of them this way.

“By thinking of our kids as precious gifts that could be taken from us at any moment we will come to treasure the time we spend with them.”

I fell in love with it the first time I saw it, so I was sure to take a few shots the next time I went to the museum.

“Exposure treatments are usually known as either flooding or graduated exposure:

* Flooding exposes the person to the anxiety-producing stimulus for as long as 1 – 2 hours.
* Graduated exposure gives the patient a greater degree of control over the length and frequency of exposures.

In both cases, the patient experiences the anxiety over and over until the stimulating event eventually loses its effect. Combining exposure with standard cognitive therapy may be particularly beneficial. This approach has helped certain patients in most anxiety disorder categories, including post-traumatic stress disorder.”

http://www.umm.edu/patiented/articles/what_psychotherapeutic_other_non-drug_approaches_anxiety_disorder_000028_8.htm

Researchers asked participants to write about their relationships, either how they met their partner or speculating on how they might never have met. “The biggest increase in satisfaction with the relationship occurred not in the group that pondered the sunny beginnings of their union but in the “mental subtraction” (or “How I might never have met Peter”) group.”

That being said I am certainly not a stoic and I’m not sure I see the value in being one. I don’t doubt the efficacy of stoicism (though if I wanted to be happy I’d be going the mindfulness and meditation route as taught by Buddhists because I think they have a more fleshed out explanation of what I need to do to get there as opposed to just a description of the end state) and many of the roads to happiness developed in ancient times still work pretty well today. But the stoics were convinced that finding that kind of contentment was actually the purpose of life, or at the very least the best way to live.

I’ve lived with a lot of different emotions, and at different times I’ve tried to feel one way or another. At some point, though, I’ve had to ask myself what the purpose of trying to feel any particular way is. I think most people take it for granted that it is better to be happy than sad, or that it is better to be content than worried. I struggle with this idea because I’m not sure how I could make that judgement.

Ultimately any philosophy that strives for contentment can only be effective if you want to be content. Of course if you’ve never really been content then trying this sort of thing out to at least get an idea of what that’s like will help you make an informed decision about whether contentment is for you.

For those who undertake a stoic philosophy, a strong sense of healthy boundaries are essential if one is going to live in society.

Especially after the CBC had a podcast about this book and its author just a few weeks ago and I read the updated article from that cbc conversation, dated today!

Spill it Frauenfelder! ;)

Do you watch hockey? Do you know what a poutine is? ARE YOU INFACT A DOUBLE AGENT FOR CANADA IN THE U.S.?!?!

I await your reply

I’m acutely conscious of the precious time I have with them as young children, and it’s morbid enough being aware of that, I don’t think clutching them to your chest and holding them like there’s no tomorrow is good for either of us.

There’s a transcendent path I’m striving for, where you can live in the moment and appreciate it exquisitely, without constant awareness of the abyss.

It’s a work in progress.

Was he being a stoic in that moment or was he lacking in compassion?

Regardless of whether or not he was being a stoic in that moment, he was definitely being a jerk. Being a stoic and being a jerk are not the same thing; but they’re not mutually exclusive, either. Stoics can be jerks in the same way that hedonists, existentialists, pragmatists, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, agnostics, communists, progressives, liberals, libertarians, and conservatives can all be jerks – or not – depending on their individual personalities. No belief system per se can make someone act like a jerk or prevent them from acting like a jerk. The belief system is simply used as a convenient justification for patterns of behavior that one is inclined to engage in by dint of one’s own character and personality. It’s simply a way of shirking individual responsibility for one’s own actions: Don’t blame me for my behavior, blame my religion/ideology/philosophy of life, which compels me to behave this way. It’s a copout, pure and simple. Jerks are jerks because they are jerks, not because of the belief system they subscribe to.

In my view, as a stoic, if someone can’t be a stoic without being a jerk, they shouldn’t even try to be a stoic at all. Stoicism, like any other religion, ideology, or philosophy of life, must be tempered with compassion or it becomes counterproductive and potentially destructive. Compassion must come first; stoicism second. It wasn’t his stoicism that was making him behave like a jerk toward you, it was his lack of compassion – which is a personality problem.

But I have to question whether he really was being a stoic at that moment. He was certainly not being a perfect stoic (of course, none of us is ever a perfect stoic, or a perfect anything else, for that matter). A perfect stoic would accept your natural reaction to this personal tragedy with the same equanimity that he accepted the tragedy itself. The fact that he was able to accept the tragedy but not your reaction to it demonstrates that he was not really thinking like a stoic in that moment. It seems to me that he was having trouble dealing with your emotions. The point of stoicism is not to berate people for having emotions; it’s to help people deal with their emotions in a positive way.

Stoicism teaches, first and foremost, that we must draw a line of distinction between those things that are under our control and those things that are not under our control: We must take personal responsibility for those things that are under our control; but we must learn to accept those things that are not under our control so that we don’t become angry or frustrated when things don’t turn out as we had hoped, and aren’t paralyzed by fear and anxiety over the prospect that things will turn out badly. The stoic ideal is one of clear-headed calmness in the face of danger and difficulty; not one of utter emotional detachment from the people you supposedly love. Your ex-fiancé sounds more like a sociopath than a stoic.

I’m a realist, I like to know what is the worst thing that can happen, what is the best, and what is the realistic thing. But always being aware of what is the worst will at least for me lead to axiety. I rather like to concentrate on the good things _now_, and be content in what I have _now_. Not dwell on “oh, if I had x I would be happy”, that so many seem to do. If there is something that really is in the way of me being happy in the now, then fix that (the reason I’m now on axiety medication), but my philosophy is that true happiness is found in finding a way to be content in who you are and what you have now. Oh, and believing that everything will work out, somehow.

The cracked glass analogy is a good one – too many people see Stoicism as focusing on negative things. Instead, it simply brings focus to the inevitable. Prepare yourself for the inevitable, and treat every day of sentience as you should – as an honour and a blessing.

To quote Titus Lucretius:

For just as children are afraid of the dark,
their elders, as often as not, are afraid in the light
of things which really there is just as little cause to fear
as those with which children contrive to frighten themselves.
These grown-up terrors are also no more than shadows
and yet they are nothing that sunlight can dissipate:
What is needed is the rational study of nature.

And even if you choose to embrace Stoic teleology, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to accept the notion that it will all work out for the best in the end. All you really have to accept is that things happen the way they do because that’s just how nature works.