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, we cannot control our body's trauma response. And the more visceral the response, the less control our minds have.

But there are ways of interactng with phantasms that are in our full control. We have power of rumination, that is to say we can set our minds to interacting with the images, which may very well serve to increase the vibrancy and immediacy of the phantasms. We can also put our our minds towards a distracting activity. We can decide to step away from the phantasms. We may very well fail at these attempts. Success in putting aside the images that dance in our head is not always something under our full control. But the decision on how to apprach those images certainly is something that we have power over.

On election night in 2020, I saw almost half of American voters turn out to support the man that I hold most responsible not only for the death of my wife but also for the majority of Americans who have died from the Covid pandemic - whether they died from the disease itself or because hospitals were overloaded and they couldn't get care for other medical contitions or even because they couldn't cope with the social isolation and quarantines and fell into despondancy and despair and took their own life.

It's hard for me to not feel as if all of those voters are responsible for those deaths. I hold them responsible for my suffering and the suffering of all of the children and mothers and sisters and fathers and brothers and friends and spouses who had to bury their loved ones. The image of cool and uncaring apathy of my own friends and family that voted for Trump is not an image that I choose to play in my head.

But that phantasm is now part of my daily life. It's like a film that I watch play out over and over. Scenes of my wife's cold, lifeless body interspersed with the fucking assholes that didn't care when they filled out the little circles next to Donald J. Fucking Trump when they voted. In some cases I see apathy - the people who put abstract (and unproven) economic ideals above the lives of individuals. In other cases I see active malice, wanting to 'pwn the libs'. These visions haunt me.

And the challenge for me - the spirtual and psychic exercise I'm taking part in - is to separate out what I choose to take up from these phantasmagoria. What thoughts do I have in response to these images that are under my control? Which thoughts are just the impressions of my imagination and their affects that I cannot control?