Dear Readers,
Here is the latest Monday Muse with a meditation from the Dying Every Day series, a perennial reminder, insight, and a reflection to consider.
Be wise and be well this week!
💀 Dying Every Day
The Dying Every Day series delivers meditations on the art of living (and dying). Each meditation provides a quote, a selected passage (from an original Stoic text), and a daily exercise to contemplate.
“There is only one road to happiness – let this rule be at hand morning, noon, and night: stay detached from things that are not up to you.”
— Epictetus, Discourses
Selected Reading
In this week’s meditation, we explore the art of happiness through a selected reading from Seneca.
Do this above all, dear Lucilius: learn how to experience joy. …
There is only one course of action that can make you happy. I beg you, dearest Lucilius, to do it: cast aside those things that glitter on the outside, those things that are promised you by another or from another, and trample them underfoot. Look to your real good, and rejoice in what is yours. What is it that is yours? Yourself; the best part of you. …
Greed for what is truly good is sure of satisfaction. “What is that?” you ask, or “Where does it come from?” I will tell you: it comes from a good conscience, from honorable counsels, from right action, from despising the things of fortune, from a calm and steady mode of life that walks a single road. […]
+Adapted from Real Joy is a Serious Matter
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Daily Exercise
Consider reflecting on what it means to be happy. How can you begin to “cast aside” the things that are not up to you and commit yourself to real joy?
📌 Perennial Reminder
Happiness often, though not invariably, accompanies the endeavours of striving, inventing and discovering, as smoke accompanies fire; but the endeavours themselves are the primary things, so that whatever happiness arises from them is an epiphenomenon – a side effect. But the observation that some people can be happy doing evil shows that the fact that happiness arises from a pursuit of goals is no guarantee that the goals are good in themselves. The point of debate both in ethics and in the narrower concern of morality is to identify which goals are good in themselves. […]
Source: Philosophy and Life by A.C. Grayling
💡 Perennial Insight
Aristotle and the Stoics cohere on numerous points regarding happiness. We have seen that it is positioned by both as the ultimate end or good of our rational existence. … Where this point indicates what is particular about the Stoic worldview, so we begin to see differentiations between the Stoic and Aristotelian conceptions of happiness. This divergence becomes increasingly apparent when considering how each school conceives of the relationship between happiness and externals. … We should recall here the Stoic mantra regarding indifference to externals. Our happiness, that is, our rational existence, is not perturbed by nor drawn to externals. […]
Source: Beyond the Individual by Will Johncock (via In Search of Wisdom)
🛋️ Perennial Reflection
This week’s passages reminded me of what it means to live a good life. No matter how we answer the question, we need to make it our goal to achieve it. As Seneca put it, “No one ever became wise by chance.” The art of living, like most things, requires intentional and consistent effort.
In her book What Do You Want Out of Life?, the philosopher Valerie Tiberius (a previous podcast guest) explains,
The way that we pursue a good life—no matter how it is defined—is by having goals, figuring out plans for attaining them, and acting on those plans. If you think that human well-being consists in achieving certain objective goods such as knowledge, friendship, or a relationship with God, then you have to figure out what it means to acquire knowledge, be a good friend, or develop a relationship with God, and you have to aim at these things in your actions.
Although we all generally have goals and pursue a good life, the Stoics (and others) remind us that we tend to desire things that are not actually up to us. Yes, we do better in life when we acknowledge our most important ultimate goals, but only when those goals align with what is actually up to us.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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