Slowly, this helped me deal with joggers. So remove your judgements whenever you wish and there is calm,” writes Marcus Aurelius in the Meditations. “That all is as thinking makes it so - and you control your thinking. And much of what they were saying 2,000 years ago is only now being incorporated into what we might call 'modern' psychology. The Stoics, I should point out in advance, like to shoot from the hip. Useful to be reminded of when you’re under house arrest. One explanation for its prescience might be how it drums the distinction between what you can control (your voluntary thoughts) and what you can’t (everything else). When the shit hits the fan - especially one turned up to the maximum speed setting - people tend to return to this particular philosophy-of-life-come-ancient-self-improvement-programme, whose 500-year heyday in Greece and then Rome ended a dizzying 17 centuries ago. As it rolled into spring and the virus spiked, so did sales of two of Stoicism’s core titles, Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which were proving as hard to track down as kettle bells and 00' flour. I first dug them out back in January 2020, when the world had gone only part of the way to hell in a handcart. And if it’s resilience you’re after, you could do a lot worse than the Stoics. If any year is going to have you reaching for the philosophy books, it’s this one.
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