Natural Gifts

Beginning to think

“You are not what happened to you, you are what you choose to become”
Carl Jung

Last time I was here, oh so many moons ago, I talked about stoicism and existentialism and why they were important.  I wanted to continue that a bit, and set the stage for a GSO podcast and all sorts of exciting stuff.  

The reason I got into philosophy is because I thought I had no idea how to live and philosophers seemed to have it all figured out.  It was long before I realized that life can only be lived, it can’t be figured out. Philosophy did give me some good bullet points to keep in mind and helped me find the strength to go back to them.  It started with me having a drunk driving accident at 21 that put me in a coma. Up until that point I was just a shitty kid, seemingly unable to think about anything and staying stuck while going as hard as possible in safe, unhealthy patterns. 

Philosophy is one thing that allowed me to separate myself out and realize that I was still that shitty kid who was afraid to think and could only act, but I can change that. When I say philosophy I do not mean academic philosophy, of people trying to outpontificate each other with ridiculous words*, but philosophy that asks – “how should we live?”.  Change did not come quick, I am more than a decade from that moment and still struggle daily.

Life is understood as a continuum, your worst self to your best self.  I saw that for me, living philosophically is how I move up on that continuum. I don’t think literal philosophy is needed, but we should understand that everyone is their life philosophy personified. Our philosophy guides us and tells us right and wrong and our place in it,  how you live from what you have learned in life.  

That being said, actual philosophy is what I fell into, and I thought it could be a great replacement for not having a father and not knowing how to live. It supplied answers to questions I thought I would never get an opportunity to answer, because I didn’t know what to ask, and when I did I was afraid to ask the question.  Stoicism is what I first fell into, and while I did not fully grasp its requirements for virtue, some things appeared crystal clear, such as the Stoic idea of Nature. Nature was a big part of Stoicism, and there is a lot to say about it. I only want to look at it in one way here and will get into the rest down the road..  Nature contains everything, no one is outside of nature, everything makes it up. Nature is more than just the physical things, it’s all the things that happen as well. From enormous life events to the reality of time, nature moves biologically as well as chronologically. It is the way life is. It is not saying that you have no personal power to change things, it is just saying that whatever happens, happened.  You can’t change it, you can only change your response.

We’re all natural

Even so, it doesn’t mean that we can change everything, just things within our own power.  The only thing for sure in our power always is our own responses, and even that is debatable. Us only being in control of ourselves does not mean we are cut off from everything else.  We’re all part of a greater whole called nature, interconnected with people and things and so is everything else and you realize that everything on this planet can be six Kevin Bacon degreed to you.  This brings up some real questions about how we should treat people and this planet. If we are connected then that means we are part of a greater whole. Doing things that benefit the world benefit us, and truly benefitting ourselves makes this world a better place.

So if something is given to you, it is taken from nature and if something is taken from you it is given back to nature.  This was a bitter pill to swallow, as I was told when I woke up after the accident that I would never walk or move past elementary age intellectually  What had been given to nature, or anyone else? Why did my truck even flip this time and not the other 100’s of times I have been in that situation? How is this good for anyone? It certainly wasn’t good for me.

Well, physics? To teach me something? Regardless, it happened and I couldn’t change it.  I oscillated between outright anger and angrily reading very slowly in bed. I began to realize that I could control my reaction to my impairments, and I improved. I could not really think about things

The Stoic Seneca stated that anything that can be taken away is something that is only rented to you, and it does not go anywhere, it only returns back to nature’s hands.  This was poignant but hard to handle.  “I’m part of nature, why can’t it stay in my hands?”  Later I realized that the gifts fate gives you aren’t always going to be good, but they are facts of life.  We are given a gift and we must learn to work with it the best we can.

Gifts life brings

This world is full of some horrific gifts, and some wonderful ones.  We can’t only have one. Positives and negatives are inseparable, you cannot make sense of only one. There is no front without a back, or up without a down.   This is what brings depth and meaning to life. Pain is a dimension of depth and is unavoidable, as Jung says, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain”.  We must enter into life to live it, to become more than two-dimensional. Entering into life, shedding the armor we have been unable to take off makes both the good and bad of life more real and that is terrifying. 

If you have avoided pain for this long in life, you probably are not living it correctly.  Since pain is unavoidable, how do we deal with it without armor? Without our defenses and bad habits that have shielded us from reality because we thought we had to. When we move unrestricted it adds an electric dynamic to life. Taking off our unnecessary helmet, things look entirely different.  We see things that we can change that we thought we couldn’t, and we see that when we can’t change our circumstances we must change ourselves.

Sometimes, life is too real, too raw, to be able to handle.  I am not talking about taking on more than you can handle or trying to sift through life, throwing away the bad and keeping the good.  I am saying that each painful meeting in life, of existential angst or true misery, is an opportunity. We are wounded in life, but growth, real transformation, only comes from those wounds.  It is an opportunity for us to define, even if it just us becoming aware of the specialness of each individual moment and who is important to us.  

I would like to end with a quote from Marcus Aurelius who wrote in his journal Meditations, probably depressingly before defending his Roman border while all of his children died (dude had it rough).

“Human life:
Duration: momentary. 

Nature: changeable. 

Perception: dim.

Condition of body: decaying.

Soul: spinning around. 

Fortune: unpredictable.

Lasting fame: uncertain.  

Sum up:
The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.  Then what can guide us? Only philosophy.” 

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*hey, I don’t know what academic philosophy is, it seems to be great for some people. I’ve never even taken a philosophy class.  Heideggar is an existentialist, I can’t make fun of anyone about ridiculous words. And this does not apply to all modern academic philosophers by any means, but ones that dance around how to live or ignore it completely, that argue about semantics and don’t question being or concern themselves with life – is not my jam and not what I mean when I say philosophy.

The word philosophy means the love of wisdom, and there’s wisdom in everything if looked at correctly. The world’s funny, what is wise for one won’t be for another, and neither are wise when they start fighting about it.

Wisdom does not come from only using one way of thinking, it comes from open-mindedly weighing your decisions and thinking about why you came to that one. Acting with “wisdom” or rationality only as an M.O. is never wise. True wisdom should be tempered with compassion. This isn’t to say that we must live with kindness as the only thing in us; that we shouldn’t get angry, shouldn’t covet, or lie, or anything else that’s bad. It is realizing that beating ourselves up when we do bad things doesn’t help us. We must have compassion for ourselves, and try to understand why we just did something a part of the core of us didn’t want to do. Learning how to let the walls down inside us and walk over them teaches us so much not just about ourselves, but other people.