18 May 2022
We begin with a quote from Seneca (a Stoic) requiring dissection and understanding to realize that in its prayer-like simplicity, it contains some valuable hints about the living of an examined life.
“Let us therefore set out whole-heartedly, leaving aside our many distractions and exert ourselves in this single purpose, before we realize too late the swift and unstoppable flight of time and are left behind. As each day arises, welcome it as the very best day of all, and make it your own possession. We must seize what flees” Seneca, Moral Letters, 108.27b-28a in The Daily Stoic, 9 May).
The power of Seneca’s sentiment is in its reverence for life and in its prescriptive potential. The latter because, if we choose to give our all to this day, and then wash, rinse, and repeat the next day...a life worth living is the result.
I have been in university for seven straight years. This is longer than sanity should allow as so much of my time is focused on read this, read that, write...words, words, words. Life, qua life, is about acting even more than thinking. Of course, life is best lived with considered principles, self-discipline, dignity, and courage but if we only think and write about these things, we never get to the living part and it’s the living part that we’re here for. And it is the living part that tests our real knowledge, our integrated selves.
How do I justify that claim, that we are here to live, to act? That claim is justified with an appeal to a particular understanding of what constitutes the self. If the self is within us, and the ideas that most satisfy me say it is, then life is about bringing that self forward and into the light. Aristotle, Maslow, Erikson, and Rogers (and more) staked their claims on human beings as creatures whose purpose is self-actualization.
In the days of writing this particular blog, it occurred to me that a gardener or arborist never asks a cherry tree to be a magnolia anymore than I ask our cats to bark. Creatures—living things—have their own natures. Some might say each creature also has an obligation to that nature and to those that brought it forth, to do its very best to become fully itself—because we can.
With that understanding of self in place, The Daily Stoic’s Seneca provides a means of becoming fully you: clarity, optimistic commitment, and regular principled action in service of one’s own values. Seneca uses synonymous terms: whole-heartedness stands in for optimistic commitment, while putting distractions aside, is clarity. Exertion is action, while our single purpose invokes clarity, values, and acting on those, which is principled living.
Seneca’s warning is reflected in the title of the post from The Daily Stoic: carpe diem or seize (pluck) the day. While I cannot endorse our need to seize all that flees, to live as though life goes on forever, is to live in blindness of every seasonal message nature sends. Look at the cherry blossoms and magnolias blooming as I write. They are in high season this week. A magnolia is lucky if its petals survive one month while a long blossoming is two weeks of clean white & pink blooms. Life is movement and change, and Seneca is urging us to be clear in purpose and committed to optimistic action in pursuit of living our individual lives.
As the 12-steppers say, one day at a time. Those able to live their days such that they can read Seneca’s quote and say, Yes, I did that today, yesterday...are living life as I believe it is meant to be lived.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Holiday, R. & Hanselman, S. (2016). The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Portfolio/Penguin.
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