A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (10 page)

Furthermore, there is a difference between
contemplating
something bad happening and
worrying about
it. Contemplation is an intellectual exercise, and it is possible for us to conduct such exercises without its affecting our emotions. It is possible, for example, for a meteorologist to spend her days contemplating tornadoes without subsequently living in dread of being killed by one. In similar fashion, it is possible for a Stoic to contemplate bad things that can happen without becoming anxiety-ridden as a result.

Finally, negative visualization, rather than making people glum, will increase the extent to which they enjoy the world around them, inasmuch as it will prevent them from taking that world for granted. Despite—or rather, because of—his (occasional) gloomy thoughts, the Stoic will likely enjoy the picnic far more than the other picnickers who refuse to entertain similarly gloomy thoughts; he will take delight in being part of an event that, he fully realizes, might not have taken place.

T
HE CRITIC OF
S
TOICISM
might now raise another concern. If you don’t appreciate something, you won’t mind losing it. But thanks to their ongoing practice of negative visualization, the Stoics will be remarkably appreciative of the people and things around them. Haven’t they thereby set themselves up for heartache? Won’t they be deeply pained when life snatches these people and things away, as it sometimes surely will?

Consider, by way of illustration, the two fathers mentioned earlier. The first father periodically contemplates the loss of his child and therefore does not take her for granted; to the contrary, he appreciates her very much. The second father assumes that his child will always be there for him and therefore takes her for granted. It might be suggested that because the second father does not appreciate his child, he will respond to her death with a shrug of his shoulders, whereas the first father, because he deeply appreciates his child, has set himself up for heartache if she dies.

Stoics, I think, would respond to this criticism by pointing out that the second father almost certainly will grieve the loss of his child: He will be full of regret for having taken her for granted.
In particular, he is likely to be racked with “if only” thoughts: “If only I had spent more time playing with her! If only I had told her more bedtime stories! If only I had gone to her violin recitals instead of going golfing!” The first father, however, will not have similar regrets; because he appreciated his daughter he will have taken full advantage of opportunities to interact with her.

Make no mistake: The first father
will
grieve the death of his child. As we shall see, the Stoics think periodic episodes of grief are part of the human condition. But at least this father can take consolation in the knowledge that he spent well what little time he had with his child. The second father will have no such consolation and as a result might find that his feelings of grief are compounded by feelings of guilt. It is the second father, I think, who has set himself up for heartache.

The Stoics would also respond to the above criticism by observing that at the same time as the practice of negative visualization is helping us appreciate the world, it is preparing us for changes in that world. To practice negative visualization, after all, is to contemplate the impermanence of the world around us. Thus, a father who practices negative visualization, if he does it correctly, will come away with two conclusions: He is lucky to have a child, and because he cannot be certain of her continued presence in his life, he should be prepared to lose her.

This is why Marcus, immediately after advising readers to spend time thinking about how much they would miss their possessions if these possessions were lost, warns them to “beware lest delight in them leads you to cherish them so dearly that their loss would destroy your peace of mind.”
¹⁶
Along similar lines, Seneca, after advising us to enjoy life,
cautions us not to develop “over-much love” for the things we enjoy. To the contrary, we must take care to be “the user, but not the slave, of the gifts of Fortune.”
¹⁷

Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it. This in turn means that by practicing negative visualization, we can not only increase our chances of experiencing joy but increase the chance that the joy we experience will be durable, that it will survive changes in our circumstances. Thus, by practicing negative visualization, we can hope to gain what Seneca took to be a primary benefit of Stoicism, namely, “a boundless joy that is firm and unalterable.”
¹⁸

I
MENTIONED IN THE INTRODUCTION
that some of the things that attracted me to Buddhism could also be found in Stoicism. Like Buddhists, Stoics advise us to contemplate the world’s impermanence. “All things human,” Seneca reminds us, “are short-lived and perishable.”
¹⁹
Marcus likewise reminds us that the things we treasure are like the leaves on a tree, ready to drop when a breeze blows. He also argues that the “flux and change” of the world around us are not an accident but an essential part of our universe.
²⁰

We need to keep firmly in mind that everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us. If nothing else, our own death will deprive us of them. More generally, we should keep in mind that any human activity that cannot
be carried on indefinitely must have a final occurrence. There will be—or already has been!—a last time in your life that you brush your teeth, cut your hair, drive a car, mow the lawn, or play hopscotch. There will be a last time you hear the sound of snow falling, watch the moon rise, smell popcorn, feel the warmth of a child falling asleep in your arms, or make love. You will someday eat your last meal, and soon thereafter you will take your last breath.

Sometimes the world gives us advance notice that we are about to do something for the last time. We might, for example, eat at a favorite restaurant the night before it is scheduled to close, orwe might kiss a lover who is forced by circumstances to move to a distant part of the globe, presumably forever. Previously, when we thought we could repeat them at will, a meal at this restaurant or a kiss shared with our lover might have been unremarkable. But now that we know they cannot be repeated, they will likely become extraordinary events: The meal will be the best we ever had at the restaurant, and the parting kiss will be one of the most intensely bittersweet experiences life has to offer.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life. Some people, I realize, will find it depressing or even morbid to contemplate impermanence. I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain such thoughts.

On Becoming Invincible

O
UR MOST IMPORTANT CHOICE
in life, according to Epictetus, is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal. Most people choose the former because they think harms and benefits come from outside themselves. According to Epictetus, though, a philosopher—by which he means someone who has an understanding of Stoic philosophy—will do just the opposite. He will look “for all benefit and harm to come from himself.”
¹
In particular, he will give up the rewards the external world has to offer in order to gain “tranquility, freedom, and calm.”
²

In offering this advice, Epictetus is turning the normal logic of desire fulfillment on its head. If you ask most people how to gain contentment, they will tell you that you must work to get it: You must devise strategies by which to fulfill your desires and then implement those strategies. But as Epictetus points out, “It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united.”
³
A better strategy for getting what you want, he says, is to make it your goal to want only those things that are easy to obtain—and ideally to want only those things that you can be certain of obtaining.

While most people seek to gain contentment by changing the world around them, Epictetus advises us to gain contentment by changing ourselves—more precisely, by changing our desires. And he is not alone in giving this advice; indeed, it is the advice offered by virtually every philosopher and religious thinker who has reflected on human desire and the causes of human dissatisfaction.
⁴
They agree that if what you seek is contentment, it is better and easier to change yourself and what you want than it is to change the world around you.

Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill. Your other desires should conform to this desire, and if they don’t, you should do your best to extinguish them. If you succeed in doing this, you will no longer experience anxiety about whether or not you will get what you want; nor will you experience disappointment on not getting what you want. Indeed, says Epictetus, you will become invincible: If you refuse to enter contests that you are capable of losing, you will never lose a contest.
⁵

E
PICTETUS’S
H
ANDBOOK
OPENS
, somewhat famously, with the following assertion: “Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.” He offers our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions as examples of things that are up to us, and our possessions and reputation as examples of things that aren’t.
⁶
From this assertion it follows that we are faced with a choice in the desires we form: We can want things that are up to us, or we can want things that are not up to us.

If we want things that are not up to us, though, we will sometimes fail to get what we want, and when this happens, we will “meet misfortune” and feel “thwarted, miserable, and upset.”
⁷
In particular, Epictetus says, it is foolish for us to want friends and relatives to live forever, since these are things that aren’t up to us.
⁸

Suppose we get lucky, and after wanting something that is not up to us, we succeed in getting it. In this case, we will not end up feeling “thwarted, miserable, and upset,” but during the time we wanted the thing that is not up to us, we probably experienced a degree of anxiety: Since the thing is not up to us, there was a chance that we wouldn’t get it, and this probably worried us. Thus, wanting things that are not up to us will disrupt our tranquility, even if we end up getting them. In conclusion, whenever we desire something that is not up to us, our tranquility will likely be disturbed: If we don’t get what we want, we will be upset, and if we do get what we want, we will experience anxiety in the process of getting it.

C
ONSIDER AGAIN
Epictetus’s “dichotomy of control”: He says that some things are up to us and some things aren’t up to us. The problem with this statement of the dichotomy is that the phrase “some things aren’t up to us” is ambiguous: It can be understood to mean either “There are things over which we have
no control at all
” or to mean “There are things over which we
don’t
have
complete
control.” If we understand it in the first way, we can restate Epictetus’s dichotomy as follows: There are things over which we have complete control and things over which we have no control at all. But stated in this
way, the dichotomy is a false dichotomy, since it ignores the existence of things over which we have some but not complete control.

Consider, for example, my winning a tennis match. This is not something over which I have complete control: No matter how much I practice and how hard I try, I might nevertheless lose a match. Nor is it something over which I have no control at all: Practicing a lot and trying hard may not guarantee that I will win, but they will certainly affect my chances of winning. My winning at tennis is therefore an example of something over which I have some control but not complete control.

This suggests that we should understand the phrase “some things aren’t up to us” in the second way: We should take it to mean that there are things over which we don’t have complete control. If we accept this interpretation, we will want to restate Epictetus’s dichotomy of control as follows: There are things over which we have complete control and things over which we don’t have complete control. Stated in this way, the dichotomy is a genuine dichotomy. Let us therefore assume that this is what Epictetus meant in saying that “some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.”

Now let us turn our attention to the second branch of this dichotomy, to things over which we don’t have complete control. There are two ways we can fail to have complete control over something: We might have no control at all over it, or we might have some but not complete control. This means that we can divide the category of things over which we don’t have complete control into two subcategories: things over which we have no control at all (such as whether the sun will
rise tomorrow) and things over which we have some but not complete control (such as whether we win at tennis). This in turn suggests the possibility of restating Epictetus’s dichotomy of control as a trichotomy: There are things over which we have complete control, things over which we have no control at all, and things over which we have some but not complete control. Each of the “things” we encounter in life will fall into one and only one of these three categories.