Our Will

What a truth it is that you are a result of your will. Your body is molded by diet and exercise, your mind by your will to focus and learn, and your finances by your daily labor and spending. All of these actions are within your direct control if you will grab the reigns. Who is your master? If you are unable to control that which sits within your own mind, what hope is there? Be a master of your own mind and you will make progress towards being the master of your world.  

Yes, the odds are stacked against you. I'm sorry, but that's life. Put your head down. Work. 

Kerryn Feehan on my Big Fat Fabulous Life

Isn't that about as Stoic as you can get? We all, in our various ways, and some more than others, have the odds stacked against us. For better or worse, we are born at certain times, to certain parents under certain conditions all completely out of our control. The person with every opportunity in the world is incapable of self-control and unable to establish their own life. The person born into poverty, racism, and political instability is able to rise up and create their own good life both large and small. This isn't about material success, but about the success that comes from putting your head down and doing the work: marriage, family, learning, friends, work, diet, etc. We all have to do the work regardless of where we are in life. What is the alternative? Is it an alternative to simply give in to every urge, every lazy offering of our culture that wants to turn us into payment methods?

When you are faced with a moment of decision, which is a hundred times a day, what decision do you make? There are times when it is nearly always the wrong one: Yes, sure, I will have the bottomless fries with that. Your life is the accumulation of thousands of decisions both large and small. What do you use to make those decisions? Where do you hold the responsibility for where you find yourself today? What path can you start following? Be well.

Discipline

Discipline in all things: love, work, exercise, diet, learning, etc. Doing the right thing often means doing the more difficult. When in doubt, do the hard thing and 9 out of 10 times it will be the right thing.  

How often does that easy thing today have a high price tomorrow? Better to exercise one's discipline today than suffer the consequences of our laziness, inattention, and self indulgence tomorrow. As you go through your day, how many opportunities are there to flex the muscle of discipline? Too many to count because it is so easy to say yes to yourself when you should learn to say no. No to the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Say yes to the seven virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity. Christian yes, but wise nevertheless. As Seneca said, to paraphrase: take your wisdom where you find it. Wise is wise. Be well. 

ICMM

There is no one you can name who knows how he began to want what he now wants. People are not led by their intentions but jerked about by whims. Sometimes we make the best of fortune, but just as often fortune gets the better of us. It is shameful to drift rather than to go forward; shameful to find oneself in the midst of a whirlwind of events and ask, astonished, "How did I get here?"

Letters on Ethics

Seneca

When my daughter was in elementary school, she received a certificate that stated: I Can Manage Myself (ICMM). I recall it well because I put the same acronym on a sign above my desk. Isn't that one of the most obvious requirements of an adult, of a rational person, that they will have the capacity to manage their own lives, make plans, and follow through on them? How do we make those plans? What do we use to guide their creation? Philosophy. We need a filter, philosophy, to separate out what is irrational so that we are not wasting our lives in pursuit of the trivial. Yes, we all want to have meaningful jobs but not for the purpose of impressing our high school classmates or submitting to the will of our family.

We don't want to spend our lives buying impressive consumer goods to create the impression we are successful. We don't want to spend our lives managing impressions on Facebook while our "real" lives are in a shambles. Life is a serious business so we should do more research on how to live than on how to boil an egg or buy a pair of boots. 

Don't find yourself sitting in the middle of a room full of "whims" wondering what it was all about. Be well.