Stoic Philosophy and Grief: A Personal Journey

Grief is something that we all experience at some point in our lives. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one, a job, or even a dream, the pain, and sadness can be overwhelming. As someone who has dealt with grief in my own life, I have found comfort in the teachings of stoic philosophy.

Stoicism is a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of reason, virtue, and self-control. It teaches us to focus on what is within our control and let go of what is not. When it comes to grief, this philosophy can be incredibly helpful.

One of the key teachings of stoicism is that we should accept the things we cannot change. This can be difficult when we are dealing with the loss of something or someone we love. However, accepting the reality of the situation can help us move forward and find peace.

Another important aspect of stoicism is the idea of focusing on what we can control. While we may not be able to change the fact that we have experienced loss, we can control how we respond to it. We can choose to honor the memory of our loved ones, find new opportunities in the wake of a job loss, or pivot our goals and dreams after a setback.

At the same time, stoicism reminds us to be grateful for what we do have. Even in the midst of grief, there are things to be thankful for. We can be grateful for the time we had with our loved one, for the experiences and memories we shared, and for the support and love of those around us.

Stoic philosophy also teaches us to focus on the present moment. While we may be tempted to dwell on the past or worry about the future, the present is all we truly have. By focusing on the present, we can find peace in the moment and work towards building a better future.

Of course, dealing with grief is not easy. It can be a long and difficult journey, and there will be times when we struggle to find meaning or purpose in our pain. But by embracing the teachings of stoic philosophy, we can find strength in our struggles and grow through our grief.

Just to kind of top things off, I’d like to leave you with two quotes from two Roman Stoics who have gone through much more hardships than I have, and have become exemplars of resilience for the ages, and highlight why I think they’re helpful.

From Epictetus:

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”

This quote from Epictetus emphasizes the importance of our perspective on events and circumstances. When we experience grief, it is not the event itself that causes us pain, but rather our interpretation and reaction to it. By recognizing this, we can take control of our thoughts and emotions and find peace in difficult times.

From Marcus Aurelius:

“Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbors, unless with a view to some mutual benefit. To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming — in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the ruler within you — means a loss of opportunity for some other task.”

This quote from Marcus Aurelius highlights the importance of focusing on our own inner virtues and living a life of purpose, rather than getting caught up in external distractions and concerns. When we experience grief, it can be easy to become fixated on the past or what we have lost, but by following the Stoic principles of mindfulness and living in the present moment, we can find solace in our inner strength and resilience.

As a final note, I want to emphasize that there is no right or wrong way to grieve. Everyone’s journey is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with loss. However, by embracing the principles of stoic philosophy and focusing on what is within our control, we can find comfort and strength in the midst of even the most difficult times.

Ultimate Change: Death

Death is an uncomfortable subject for many people, but it is a necessary part of life. Death is about change and transformation and all of this is related to change, a topic addressed in my friend’s previous article. Most people are resistant to change, whether it’s a change in a new job, a new home or an ever-changing family dynamic, but death is a type of change that most of us are not willing to look at or even think about. I remember attending my maternal grandfather’s funeral back in 2003 and while the funeral Mass commenced, (because my family is Catholic), I thought, “why does death happen to us?” It sounds like a juvenile question because I was only 14 years old; I should also mention that my dad had passed only a year ago, so the question of death and how we “survived” our deceased relative was on my mind a lot back then, it still is now actually. We spoke of how the Stoics dealt with the question of death, now we will explore the Taoist view which is similar to the Greek Stoics.

The Joyful Sage

We encounter a passage in Chuang Tzu where the ancient sage himself is banging a drum and singing like an excited five-year old. His friend comes up to him and asks Chuang Tzu why he is acting so strangely after the passing of his wife. Chuang Tzu gives him his straightforward answer:

“‘It is not so. When she first died, was it possible for me to be singular and not affected by the event? But I reflected on the commencement of her being. She had not yet been born to life; not only had she no life, but she had no bodily form; not only had she no bodily form, but she had no breath. During the intermingling of the waste and dark chaos, there ensued a change, and there was breath; another change, and there was the bodily form; another change, and there came birth and life. There is now a change again, and she is dead. The relation between these things is like the procession of the four seasons from spring to autumn, from winter to summer. There now she lies with her face up, sleeping in the Great Chamber; and if I were to fall sobbing and going on to wall for her, I should think that I did not understand what was appointed (for all). I therefore restrained myself!’”

In Taoism, death is another transformation of elements, Chuang Tzu’s wife is being converted into nutrients for the earth and animals. The analogy of the four seasons is helpful in understanding this change. When we are born it is like Spring, midlife is Summer, old age is Autumn and death is Winter. However, the procession begins all over again, we are in a constant flux both psychologically and physically. There are people who have trouble letting go of old hatreds and it seems like they are “stuck” in a pattern of behaviour; it is like being stuck in a season that never changes, now doesn’t that sound absurd. One of the things that I have learned about the grieving process is that there comes a point where the grim darkness that you feel from losing someone you loved can make you reflect on what you can control and what you cannot control, and if this sounds Stoic, it’s because it is. Despite their different cultural origins, Stoicism and Taoism are philosophical brothers.

So, that’s it for this article, until next time, fellow Socratic Buffoons.

Wei Wu Wei Part 2: Critical Point

What is the Critical Point?

So, wei wu wei can be difficult to talk about in an analytical fashion, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t communicate its essence through other means. There is an important part of this concept which is essential to understand so prepare to hear a lot of references to Star Wars and the Force because this article will be different from others we have written.

 

Manipulation of Events or the Hand of Fate Revealed?

I want to start off this piece with a short clip from one of my favorite video games, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.

 

 

Kreia is the quintessential mentor who deconstructs the whole of the Star Wars universe; she possesses an austere discipline and sharp philosophical insights which we will delve into shortly, though not all of them. What was she talking about manipulating events, including that the greatest of manipulations are not manipulations at all? She is referring to the undercurrents of the Force which is animated by all living beings. Recall Obi-Wan Kenobi’s immortal line from the very first film,

“…an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

This quote sums up the nature of the Tao. Here is an observation of Taoism and consequently wei wu wei that I have come to understand. We are not in control of outside events, we can only influence them, whether through money, seduction, or our own self motivation; but we can only be aware of those undercurrents when our mind remains quiet yet alert.

“You will know. When you are calm, at peace, passive.”

You can start to see how much of Taoism has influenced the concept of the Force.

 

Meditation and Letting your Thoughts Go

When I started to meditate, my mind was as disorganized as everyone else’s. Letting go of my thoughts seemed like an exercise in futility. Honestly, the currents of superficial thoughts that run through my head every day have no reality beyond my brain unless I act on those thoughts. “Your thoughts are your reality” as Qui Gon Jinn said to his young Padawan Obi-wan. Once, my anxious thoughts were allowed to express themselves and I allowed them to go, my mind became clearer and the anxiety I would feel would also go away. I could make more rational decisions when my brain wasn’t full of second guesses. Now we can get to the heart of Wei Wu Wei.

 

Finding the Right Moment

I wanted to become a grief counselor at one point in my life (actually recently) and the reason I wanted to hear people’s sorrows was because of the experiences of grief I went through and a feeling that I can’t really explain; this feeling could be summed up as “I see this person who believes their fractured and I want to heal that.” Here is the thing, people are naturally resistant to any kind of advice you give them when grief is on their mind; I know because that’s how I was. The key is to listen to them talk about their emotions and the memories connected to them. However, you can’t do this if your mind is preoccupied with your own worries and troubles; it requires an emptiness of thought and a little experience with the process of grief. Emotions have currents that you can influence when the time is right, that critical point where you can heal that person’s sense of loneliness in that moment. A truth often expressed in Buddhism is that all humans suffer and when the person sitting across from you realizes that you understand their pain and that it’s possible to continue living with joy and sorrow and good friends and family, then you will have understood the lesson that Kreia is talking about and the lesson of wei wu wei. You just have to understand the dance; too early and the person might think you’re trying too hard. Too late and they’ll be closed off to you until something, inevitability, happens again in their lives to require a person to confide in.

 

Conclusion

 

I know that was some real nerd-out stuff but it’s what felt natural to me. The concept of wei wu wei as a whole is to become one with those currents of the Force and act when the time is right. Depending on your goal, there will always be opportunities influence events in your favor. Personally, I plan to pursue Special Education Teaching which is fraught with its own challenges, but I have to tell myself to stop and clear my mind when those inevitable stresses of administrative obstacles and stubborn parents happen. There is always a right moment to pull back and a right moment to strike. Happy Thanksgiving from these Socratic Buffoons. Until next time!   

The Ghosts We Carry With Us

Why do We Grieve?

Whenever I look back on my life and think about the nature of grief, I start to feel cold inside. That’s a weird description, I know, but bear with me for a little while. I feel this enormous void that seems endless and any hope of joy, laughter, or sorrow with that deceased person will be gone forever. Memory is a mere shadow next to when that person was alive, yet memory is ultimately what we will have. This sounds grim, but that has been my experience with grief; it is a psychological reaction to the sudden loss of something or someone precious to us. And even if you prepare yourself for a loved one’s death, grief will still be there, waiting, because so long as we desire to live and love, the fear of our own mortality and the fear that those close to us will one day die, haunts our minds underneath our everyday worries and hopes. The Stoics realized the magnanimity of death and they sought to help ease our fears.

Ghost in the Shell

When my father passed away fifteen years ago, I was only 12 and I had no idea how to respond to the news of his passing. I mostly repressed what I felt all those years ago and this truly stunted my emotional growth. It was only 3 years ago that I finally accepted the reality of his passing and that I wasn’t a robot. No matter how much a person may pride themselves on their “toughness,” the truth is that death turns anyone into a child momentarily; I’ve seen this in my own experience of trying not to feel emotion and I have seen how this manifests in other people. And my dad has not been the only person I lost, there have been others and for this article I will just say that. When I allowed the process of grief to finish, I figured out that the point was not to live life on autopilot, nor to live life without a purpose like a mourning ghost, but to live it in a way where you could say to yourself everyday, “If I die today, I can say I tried to live my life helping people who truly want help and to love those who deserved that love.” What do I mean by “love those who deserved that love?”  I mean love those people who reciprocate ideas, thoughts, emotions, and good laughter because life’s too short to be grim and paranoid of other people’s intentions.

Wisdom From the Grave

The sayings of the Stoics are naturally focused on our frail mortality because they knew that we were not tortoises who live for hundreds of years nor are we trees that exist for thousands of years. The Roman statesmen and Stoic, Seneca had this to say about the human attitude towards death:

“They fight against their own bodily weakness, and they regard old age as a hardship on no other grounds than it puts them on the shelf…Meanwhile, as they rob and are robbed, as they disturb each other’s peace, as they make each other miserable, their lives pass without satisfaction, without pleasure, without mental improvement. No one keeps death in view, no one refrains from hopes that look far ahead…”

This quote could easily apply to today’s culture of work as the ongoing maxim, “time is money” is as strong as ever. Another Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, had many thoughts on death. Here’s one thought:

“The conclusion of an activity, the end or what might be called the death of an impulse or opinion, there’s no evil in these. Look at the various stages of life, childhood, boyhood, manhood, old age; each ended in a kind of death. Was it so dreadful? Think now about the life you lived with your grandfather, then with your mother, then with your father. Looking at these and all the other changes, transformations, and endings that have happened in your life, ask yourself, ‘Was there anything to be feared in all this?’ No, no more than in the end, the cessation, the transformation of life itself.”

This is what I try to frame my life around, life is a constant transformation. Each stage of life is a transition to another stage until death. For me, going through grief is like being cleansed in fires from Purgatory because the process is painful, but in the end that is what makes you able to carry on and continue.

Conclusion: Nearing the End of Our Journey

Grief is not easy to talk about because of our fear of death, but I hope that by talking about my own personal journey, I can help someone else who might be going through the same thing right now. Speaking of endings, we are nearing the end of writing these Stoic articles, but that doesn’t mean that we are finished philosophizing. Stay tuned for more next week and we’ll let you know what we are scheming. Until next time!

The Process of Grief: Confronting the Inevitability of Death

In the Words of Marcus Aurelius

“Constantly reflect on how swiftly all that exists and is coming to be is swept past us and disappears from sight. For substance is like a river in perpetual flow, and its activities are ever changing, and its causes infinite in their variations, and hardly anything at all stands still; and ever at our side is the immeasurable span of the past and the yawning gulf of the future, into which all things vanish away. Then how is he not a fool who in the midst of all this is puffed up with pride, or tormented, or bewails his lot as though his troubles will endure for any great while?” (Meditations, 5.23)

This is something I’ve definitely had to work on over the years. Remembering something very simple: even though the people in my life come and go, and it saddens me greatly, I have no control over when death or some other circumstance takes a friend or family member. And as cliché as it sounds, death is really life’s natural conclusion. And death takes us all at some point, and then comes grief. Today is going to be a little different, rather than give you something quoted from the passages of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius on how we should deal with grief, I’m just going to speak from a result of my own reflections on the matter, and hopefully they line up well enough with Stoicism to be considered such, and if not, I hope you find them useful anyway.

Grief Is Personal

Again, this might sound stupid, but every day you wake up remember that death is a natural part of life. You can no more stop death than you can control whether or not the sun rises. I, like a lot of people, have had a life in which a lot of people have passed away. Some of them were family members, and others very close friends. Each time one of these things happened, I felt the pain of loss very deeply. The thing about me is that I also have depression, and you’ll hear people tell you that grief and depression are different, and they’re right. But what people don’t often talk about is how grief can slide easily into depression for those of us who are well acquainted with it. Often, I started to feel like all of these people left me because I wasn’t loved, or that the world hated me, or when I was still religious that I’ve must’ve done something so egregious to displease God, that I was hated by supposedly the most benevolent being in the entire cosmos. Self-centered, right? That’s not a knock against people who experience these thoughts, I just admitted to having them myself. But did you notice anything? It’s all about your experience of the event.

See, because here’s the thing: we have people while we have them, and the whole point of Stoicism or any other philosophy, is to help us frame our lives in such a way that we can make reasoned choices that are better in some meaningful way. So while we have these treasured people in our lives, I think the Stoics would say to treasure them while they’re here, and to know that you will be okay when they’re gone. You will carry them with you in your memory. There’s another important point I want to bring up about that last bit. We carry them with us in our memory… We often hear people tell us when we are grieving, “person X wouldn’t want you moping around all day.” Usually, these kind of comments are unthinking and just something you’re supposed to say if you care. But really take a long look at what your loved one would want for you. Would they want you to be grieving for months on end? If they loved you, probably not. Would they want you to sequester yourself from the rest of the world? Again, probably not. So what would these people want from you, what do our loved ones want from us? The short answer is this: to go on living. Remember the things that our loved ones value about each of us, and continue to embody those. We have to continue forward. We honor their memory with each breath we take, and with each life we touch. So in a way, we are the ones keeping them alive in our hearts. When we fully consider what our loved one would want, we can then begin to be okay without them here. Hopefully that wasn’t too repetitive, but I think this hits where it needed to. Before I go, I want to share with you a post that I made while taking an online course on stoicism and Marcus Aurelius, on the topic of coping with loss and mortality.

Conclusion: Sharing One Final Thought

Here’s the final piece, as is: “The human soul does violence to itself above all when it becomes, so far as it can, an abscess and a sort of morbid outgrowth on the universe. For to set your mind against anything that happens is to set yourself apart from nature, which subsumes the nature of all other things.”

This is a very useful maxim, and one that I have found to be very true. When dealing with pain of any kind, physical or psychological (stemming from loss or otherwise) there is always a psychological component to it. I’ve had to fairly recent contrasting experiences with grief. One was three years ago, when an uncle I was very close to passed away. And the other was last year when my grandmother passed away.

In the first case, I had a very odd dream where I suppose my mind pieced together the various circumstances of my uncles health, and I had a dream where the doctors on his case were explaining to his wife (my aunt) that he was showing abnormal white blood cell counts and abnormal proteins in the blood and they thought that it might be some form of cancer. When I went to visit him just prior to his death, I told my aunt about the dream and she was surprised that I happened to dream essentially what the doctors had told her without having any direct contact. This made me feel as though I could’ve done something to prevent him from dying if I had said something sooner. And as a result, I allowed myself to descend into a spiral of guilt which led to depression. This is when I decided to seek therapy. After about 11 months, I managed to get my symptoms down to a subclinical level (somewhat humorously, it was due in large part to remembering Epictetus).

In the second instance, my grandma had fallen and as a consequence, had punctured her lung and she was on a respirator for a while. Her healing factor was diminished such that the hope of her making a full recovery was extremely slim and she would likely have been in a great deal of pain, and ultimately she decided on a comfortable death via morphine drip. The last night that she was alive she made a point to tell all of us that she loved us and that she wanted us to continue living our lives to the fullest and not to cry so much for her. In this case, I was reminded that all of our lives, including hers, are essentially on loan. Eventually, they all end. And I was grateful to have had the opportunity to witness her final moments being an act of love rather than some kind of agony. As a result, it left me with a lasting impression of the temporary nature of life, and how that could sometimes be an occasion for joy, or at the very least, a reminder that in death there is a kind of repose.

This lesson helped me internalize what’s going on in the first portion of the excerpt. It also helps me to reframe many of the losses of friends and loved ones that I’ve experienced over the years in a way that allowed me to bear them without an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

Thank you for listening. Until next time.