A Stoic Guide to Grieving

This week's lesson in Pigliucci and Lopez is about objects of desire, specifically substituting objects of desire within your control for objects of desire that are not in your control. The example they give is acquisition of a new job. If your desire is a new job, whether you get it or not is outside of your control. The decision to hire you or not to hire you is the purview of the hiring committee (or hiring manager). But what is under your control is making yourself the best possible candidate for the job that you can be. If your desire is to take the steps that are needful to make yourself the best possible candidate, then you will improve your odds of being hired and also have the satisfaction of reaching your goal whether you're hired or not. This reminds me to no small extent of the prayer of St. Francis. Rather than desiring to be loved, the object of our desire should be to make ourselves into the best possible lover. O Divine Master, grant that I may Not so much

The second of the three things that are under the complete control of the human mind is impulse. (The other two mentioned in chapter one of A Handbook for New Stoics being thought and will.) Impulse here is not necessarily the normal way we think of what an impulse is. When we make an impulse purchase, we think of the impulse being the urge to buy something that we had not set out to intentionally buy. But here we are not considering that urge - that fantasy that pops into our head of what good things await if we buy this item that we have not set out to buy - but the way we contemplate that fantasy. We let the fantasy play out in our mind we form the thought that the thing is good. And because we think that it is good, we desire it. We may not be able to control the image, or even in some cases thinking about how the image is good, be we can check ourselves on whether not this is something we desire. Last night I was playing games with my partner and her children. Often times when

Pigluicci and Lopez relate that the Stoics held that three things are under our full control: thought, impulse, and will. These things don't always correspond to the way we use the words. Take the idea of thought. We generally lump everything that happens in our brain into the idea of "thought". But a more classical view is that thought is what we choose to do with images . Images, what Thomas of Aquinas referred to as phantasms, are the things that appear via the imaginative faculty of our brains (or as St. Thomas would say, our "intellects"). While we have some amount of control over phantasms, many times they simply appear out of nowhere. Those who suffer from PTSD know all too well how little control we have over some images that pop into our head. Our control comes in those ways we can decide to react to those images. In some cases, our response is visceral and outside of our control. When a sensation or smell triggers a vivid memory of traumatic event,

One of the most famous Christian prayers of the modern era is the so-called Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference. This, in a nutshell is the Stoic ideal of a life well lived. The difference from the way that we typically read this prayer and the great minds of Stoicism is that by "courage to change the things I can", the Stoics would have meant "focus only on those things that are under your complete control". The Stoic ideal is to live life as if it were Sinead O'Connor's album title, "I Do Not Want What I haven't Got". All those things that are outside of our purview of control are things we cannot control. And that is a hard truth. What, really, is under our control? As an amateur triathlete, I know full well that even our bodies are not fully under our control. I cannot control my genetic disposition for blood clots. I

As I first take up a pen and put it to paper to author this, it has been 1 year 5 months and 12 days since my wife died. I'm not sure what to say about that. I've tried to deal with the grief the only way I know how: to keep on letting the full emotions of pain and sadness and anger roll over me as they come and go; to try and order my daily life in such a way that I have the freedom and time to attend to the things that cure my body and soul; to be authentic with how I feel to myself and to others. There are also many ways that I haven't "tried" to use to cope with my loss but have nevertheless become a part of my daily existence: drinking, lashing out in anger towards those I perceive as having contributed to my wife's death, avoiding situations where I know the sadness will overwhelm me. As I write this it has also been 8 months and 2 days since the city of DC shut down to ward off the novel coronavirus. Before the shutdown went into effect that evening I