An excellent thing to remember came up in last night's discussion.
When Seneca writes:
"Many men will meet me who are drunkards, lustful, ungrateful, greedy, and excited by the frenzy of ambition."
And Marcus Aurelius reminds himself:
"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly."
They are both speaking to us and about us. I aspire to be wise and good, but on most days, I'm the lustful, greedy, ungrateful person. I'm often jealous and surly too.
It makes it much easier to control our frustration with others when we remember that we share their faults of character and that we are brothers-in-arms in the same fight against our worst impulses. We are more fortunate, though, because we have the blessing of philosophy.
I'm going to stop using this site and switch over to a more interactive version at community.stoalogos.com. Please use the link below to join!
Join us this Sunday, December 29th for the forty-sixth Sunday Stoa!
We'll kick things off at 4pm EST with 10 minutes of guided meditation, followed by 15 minutes of reflection journaling or doing a Stoic writing practice. If you'd like to skip the meditation and journaling, please join us at 4:30pm. After that, we'll use a combination of break out groups and larger group discussion to go deeper into a specific topic.
This weeks theme is progress: we'll be listening to Letter 32 from Seneca's Letters from a Stoic, and Book 1, Chapter 4 of the Discourses of Epictetus, and then discussing the ideas they puts forth.
Here's the and text if you want to check it out before Sunday:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_32
Click here to join the event:
If you're all caught up on your meditation and journaling ...
Join us this Sunday, December 22nd for the forty-fifth Sunday Stoa!
We'll kick things off at 4pm EST with 10 minutes of guided meditation, followed by 15 minutes of reflection journaling or doing a Stoic writing practice. If you'd like to skip the meditation and journaling, please join us at 4:30pm. After that, we'll use a combination of break out groups and larger group discussion to go deeper into a specific topic.
This week, we'll be listening to Letter 18 from Seneca's Letters from a Stoic, On Festivals and Fasting, and then discussing the ideas it puts forth.
Here's the video and text if you want to check it out before Sunday:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_18
Click here to join the event:
If you're all caught up on your meditation and journaling and want to skip right to the discussion, please join at 4:30pm
