The ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism is about taking responsibility for what is in one’s control and accepting the things that are not.

The serenity prayer, basically: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

It’s about living as part of nature, rather than fighting against it. I take that to mean living in the natural rhythm of the earth: using good sense, looking after the body, having practical boundaries and accepting natural outcomes, like death.

The most important values in stoicism are things we seem to be lacking as a race: reason and virtue. I dislike the word virtue, because it has religion smeared all over it, but I’m happy to interpret it as good intent.

The pillars of stoicism: reason and virtue

Using your brain. Not hurting others. That actually sounds like Satanism, which is also a very practical philosophy. A touch more individualist and libertarian, but practical none-the-less.

In stoicism, these pillars break down into wisdom, justice, courage and temperance.

Wisdom is acquiring knowledge but also the knowledge that you will never know everything. It’s the Dunning Kruger effect – the more I know, the more I think I SHOULD know, which keeps me humble. The less I know, the less I understand how much I don’t know, which gives me an inflated sense of my knowledge. Wisdom is being able to apply knowledge. Wisdom is practical, earthy intelligence. It is generational, it is in our genes and it can be a weapon against oppressors. Facts and figures can be obfuscated; wisdom is truth that lives in our bones.

Justice is the natural law that governs creatures. Not necessarily in harmony with the actual law of government, which often causes injustice. Justice is local, small-scale, contextual and flexible.

Courage exists on a scale. A person of colour standing up for their rights is not the same level of courage as a white person standing up for that person’s rights, using their privilege and lack of consequences. It’s proportional. Small acts of courage can be monumental.

Temperance is the balance of all things. It is the regulation of our appetites and the ability to moderate good and bad in our worlds. Everything in moderation.

Preparation for negative outcomes

Visualising negative outcomes to prepare: premeditatio malorum. Well, guess what I’m great at? Oh, she lives with her dwellington boots on, honey.

I’ve long been a ruminator. It’s a trauma response: if I can just iron out all the details and prepare everything perfectly, I can control what happens. I used to call this perfectionism, but that’s just the symptom. Anxiety – a symptom.

By understanding myself better, I’ve managed to hone this automatic state into something useful. I’m alert to subtle clues of doom incoming, so I can start putting together likely scenarios and planning the path to take for each eventuality. By the time the crisis arrives, I’ve done most of my catastrophising and acceptance, and can move immediately into enacting my plans.

Problem-solving has become a key skill and something I enjoy. I sometimes go too far, and try to solve other people’s problems instead of just listening, but it does also come in very handy when disaster arises. I get ENERGY from a crisis.

Emotional regulation

Understanding and working with emotions in response to life, rather than reacting under the control of our biases. Fighting against the lizard brain that wants to keep us comfortable and safe, at cost to everyone around us.

I firmly believe that a lack of awareness of one’s emotions is to blame for so much of our distress in life. If we all learned how to actually FEEL a feeling (which I had no understanding of until I had therapy), to sit and allow it to linger in us without trying to drown it out or run from it, we could start to reflect on where it came from.

Why do I feel like I’m being hunted when an email bing-bongs into my inbox? What is it about a sudden, unplanned-for, intrusion into my space that feels so threatening to me?

Awareness is the first step: I’m feeling this thing. Examination is next: what has taught me that this situation is a danger to me? Does explaining that help to diffuse it for adult me?

I can actively decide that an email is not going to kill me, and repeating that decision over and over again will literally rewire my brain so I eventually don’t feel like a fox cornered by hounds just because someone CCd me on an email about Q2 KPIs.

I’ve experienced a LOT of disregulation in my life. A stressful job, an anxiety disorder, traumatic experiences. Much of my life is structured around maintaining my regulation, and leaving my routine inevitably leads to my body and brain feeling wrong.

Emotional disregulation, aside from learning how to feel, can be hugely helped by physical regulation. Our body-brain connection is underestimated by all of us, but it’s crazy what works to get the nervous system back to homeostasis.

Here’s what I know works for me: dim light, being ‘squashed’ by my husband, walking around the house making noises, a bath, walking, hydration, sleep. Physical stuff that reminds my body it’s a living organism through sensation. An oft-used phrase is ‘being in your body’. That’s the key: what talks you down from this super-high frequency of stress and excitement where you exist only as a brain, and back into your body where you can feel your cells and expand your lungs and stretch your muscles?

The work I’m doing with my physio is helping so much with this. I feel like I’m exploring my body with my mind, visiting single vertebrae to examine the spaces between bones where expansion is needed. This precise communication has allowed me to unlock flexibility and movement I didn’t physically have before. My lowest vertebrae were moving as one, rather than separately; I now know how to move them independently using my core muscles, my breath and my focus. That’s pure magic to me. To be 36 years old and find a secret in my physicality is astounding. And it’s much harder to be emotionally disregulated when you’re fully occupying your body.

Reflection

Since reading the Japanese study on journalling, I’ve been trying to write by hand more. I gave it up a few years ago because I use so many digital mediums to track my thinking. However, it’s the pen in the hand that matters. Forming thoughts as you’re forming letters forces cohesion; you’re literally writing your story, turning abstract brainwork into something that could be followed 200 years from now.

A glance at anyone’s phone notes would show you the difference. “Get milk .Vet due? what if dragons weredinosaurs pikc up glasses !“

That’s not the same. Something about writing by hand makes us form a proper record, a narrative. You’re putting your person, or at least your diary version of your person, into it, even though you probably only intend it for yourself.

I’m lucky enough to have all my diaries from about age 8 to just a couple of years ago – probably 35 volumes. I was an obsessive diary writer as a teenager, and the level of detail is painful. Many are too hard for me to read, but I keep them. They’re what I would grab in a fire. They’re me.

What these records don’t say is as important as what they do say. With this kind of written material, it’s possible to read between the lines and put together clues as to what was really happening. Not so with the scattered the digital detritus of our how we record our thoughts today.

When we’re able to reflect – on our day, on our history, on ourselves – we’re able to adjust. We’re able to decide who we want to be.

Acceptance

Friedrich Nietzsche’s formula for human greatness was amor fati — the love of fate or acceptance of what has happened and what will happen.

“That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.”

That’s tough. Real tough. It demands a level of perspective I haven’t achieved yet, though I do often think of things in relation to the vastness of existence.

The trouble with that is: capitalism doesn’t allow that selling insurance is in no way as important as watching a child take its first step. Our society is not structured to allow perspective – in fact, I’d argue we’re constantly being distracted from the things that matter by scary news, shiny toys and manufactured pressure.

Acceptance of what’s happened and will happen is one thing. To love it? Can I ever accept the terrifying illnesses that are inevitable, to the point of love? Can I ever love the damage that’s been done to me? I’m a long way down the road of acceptance, but I’m not able to love. Maybe one day I will be.

Death as a reminder to live

Memento mori – remember you must die – is a famous stoic phrase popularised by the Victorians. It seems gloomy (and they were a very gloomy lot) but it goes beyond its viral 19th-century goth era.

Accepting death reminds us to treasure life. If we push death from our thoughts, which is how Western society works, we forget that every moment is a miracle. If we forget that, we are easy to enslave in the work of capitalism.

Death is removed from us. We entrust our dying to strangers, we entrust our dead to strangers. The death industry in this century is highly sanitised and we’re trained to fear death, quietly – don’t speak of it. Don’t mourn loudly and don’t make others think about the inevitability of not existing. Is it by design? To keep us focused on THIS plane, nose to the grindstone, paying taxes and forgetting we are miracles? Yes, probably.

What people who haven’t watched the process of dying don’t realise is that it’s a hard privilege to bear witness to the passing of a spirit from one state to another. I’d imagine watching a birth has the same effect. It’s a humbling, life-altering experience. There is no focus but on this room, this bed, this person. Everything else, drowned out by the single inevitability of our existence.

When we remember that it’s all fleeting, we make choices for ourselves based on joy and experiencing and loving and purpose. This is it. This is what we have, and the clock is running down on how many more glorious days and wood fires and seasides and kittens and Saturday mornings we have left.

The virtue of avoiding passions

This is the one area I reject, in that tricky space of virtue: rejecting passions. In stoicism, passions are unnatural, irrational and, one gathers, distasteful. Anything that causes an extreme should be avoided.

The passions are:

Distress (lupē)

Fear (phobos)

Lust (epithumia)

Delight (hēdonē)

Now, I can see the point of removing fear and distress from one’s life, even lust if it’s harmful, but I’ll never give up on delight. My everyday joys (which stoicism says are OK) can explode into elation in my mind, and I live for that. I am a person of extreme delight in small things.

There’s something very male about this denial of passions. It’s very cold water plunge, very monastic. Controlling oneself and finding pleasure a bit icky…that, to me, is not living in symbiosis with the natural world.

Eudaemonia is the Greek word for the state of wellbeing, when all the areas of stoicism are aligned and you are at peace. Peace, for me, requires delight.

So, it’s joyful stoicism for me

I wrote about my grandma a while back (in relation to journalling, funnily enough) and I used the word ‘stoic’ without thinking about what it truly means.

Without ever wasting a lot of time on self-reflection, my grandma lived stoicism very well. It wasn’t that she was trying to be cheerful about the practicalities of life; she just seemed to live in a state of acceptance.

She was very in touch with what’s real: growing things, making things, enjoying food and being active. She was a midwife but no stranger to death, so perhaps that perspective was part of it.

My best friend and I have often said we wish we could be like her. Someone so centred and so capable. I hope that’s where stoicism can take me.