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 was at what may have been the last show ever at the iconic 9:30 club in DC, punk legends DOA and The Dead Kennedys. Since then the world has fundamentally changed. Relationships are harder. We can no longer regularly greet friends and family with hugs. My partner suggested to me that I pick one thing to do to begin the hard work of coping with my grief and loss in a positive way. And so begins this blog. Here I will work my way through the exercises in A Handbook for New Stoics.

Why the Stoics? The subtitle of that workbook offers a hint, "How to Thrive in a World Out of Your Control". If losing my wife of 29 years alone hadn't jarred me from any notion of control I may have thought that I had over my life, walking face first into a global pandemic certainly did.

But there is more to the choice of Stoic phsychological exercises than the mere brute fact that they instituted a medidative tradition of coming to terms with the things we cannot control. Stoic psychological theory lies at the heart of a family of psychological therapies now known as CBT - Cognitive Behavior Therapy. CBT is one of the few psychological methods that has sound empirical evidence behind it. By no means is it foolproof. But I certainly won't be worse off by the attempt.

I also will not be uncritical of the ideas presented in the workbook. While it's widely known that Stoic ethics had profound influence on early Christianity, many people do not realize that perhaps the most significant form of influence resulted in a toxic sexual ethics - more predominant in western Christianity than eastern Christianity - but certainly far more than merely "commonplace" in both. Among other doctrines, Stoic natural law theory posited that the only lawful reason for the sex act was procreation. Sex for other rationales such as pleasure or bonding or companionship was seen as a violation of the natural law. A very curious conclusion for a religion that describes the last day as a wedding night between the Groom (Christ) and the Bride (the Church)!

The Stoics were also responsible for another blight on history, albeit one that is now in the very distant path. In late Roman antiquity, Stoicism had a resurgence in the popular mind. Given values and mores particular to the late Roman imperial era, this led to what can only be described as a suicide epidemic. While one can argue that it was a misunderstanding of Stoicism rather than Stoicism itself that led to the rash of suicides in Rome, it's clear that Stoic ethics were a "but for" condition. But for the renewed popularity of the Stoic tradition, so many peope would not have been driven to take their own lives.

Some might ask why turn to the Stoics at all if some of their ideas were so poisonous and have been so seminal in perverting the sexual ethics of the western world? One of the privileges of reviewing the history of ideas is that we can in hindsight more easily see where mistaken ideas of biology or physics or the way nature is contructed have not played out well. From our day we can see that while the psychological methodology of the Stoics has a very large value, that certain portions of their moral theories are in large need of correction.

Consider the idea that "The Stoics thought that the best way to live our life, to make it count and derive meaning from it, is to live according to nature, particularly human nature". (Pigliuci page 4.) If the Stoic idea that a life well lived is in accordance with natural law, that places a tremendous importance in correctly understanding what the laws of nature are and how they apply to individual human beings. After all, "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:23) If we make the measure of our morality a twisted concept then our moral compass will certainly be pointed in the wrong direction. Fortunately, the Stoic methodology can be divorced to a greater and lesser extent from its conception of natural law.

And so I begin this journey of learning a three part discipline: desire, action, assent. My hope is that by learning how to introspect on my own desres and actions and assents, I can transform my grief and brokenness into something more whole and fruitful.