Saturday, February 11, 2017

Thank You, Epictetus



Searching for Serenity

(c) Copyright (2017) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

For many years, I have enjoyed rereading James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon and W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge. In these somewhat similar stories, World War One veterans——an English officer and an American airman——seek inner peace in a world maddened by unending violence and insatiable materialism. The Englishman embraces the wisdom of Shangri-La, a Buddhist lamasery in Tibet; the American visits Tibet and also experiences the wisdom of a Hindu saint in an Indian ashram. The two novels emphasize Eastern spirituality.

Despite my longstanding liking for Lost Horizon and The Razor's Edge, my life has taught me that I need not forsake all Western traditions to seek inner serenity. The Greek and Roman philosophical traditions include the precepts and practice of Stoicism. For about the last eight years, the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus has greatly influenced my thinking and behavior. I am a very imperfect Stoic, but my attempted practice of Stoicism has improved my life. I have found Epictetus very helpful even though I find practicing Stoicism difficult. Reading Epictetus calms me.

Control

Epictetus emphasizes self-control, self-mastery, duty. This seemed daunting and one-sided until I understood Epictetus's insight that other people and external circumstances are simply not within my power to control. I can control only my own thoughts, values, decisions, and actions. This insight creates great responsibility but also grants great power. It shifts focus from my futile struggle to control others and to control my external environment to my possibly successful exercise of power over myself. My seizing power over myself takes away others' power over me and diminishes the power of circumstances to distress me. "Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions. Vigilantly practice indifference to external conditions. Your happiness can only be found within."

While I find it very hard to change myself, I find it impossible to change other people. Why should I continue to waste most of my energy on an impossible task when I could instead expend energy on an attainable goal?

The emphasis on controlling my inner world makes me responsible for my own well-being and happiness. It also refashions my approach to problems in my external world by transforming these situations into challenges to me to develop greater self-mastery. It takes away power from other people and from external circumstances and returns power to me. With that return of power to and over my inner self comes greater freedom.


Opportunity

Stoicism has shifted my locus of control to my inner world. Epictetus teaches me to see my difficulties as opportunities to develop greater self-mastery and resourcefulness. "Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths."

In a way, Epictetus steers me right into the storms of my life, instead of away from them. He advocates grasping the nettles of life, thinking about the inevitability of loss and death, and appreciating what I have instead of wishing to have something——anything——else. "... you move forward by using the creative possibilities of this moment, your current situation. You begin to fully inhabit this moment, instead of seeking escape or wishing that what is going on were otherwise."

One of these nettles is my inability to control the outcome of my efforts. Despite determined efforts, I can certainly fail to reach an objective. Epictetus notes that the results of my striving oftentimes depend on factors beyond my control and that I should focus on DOING my best but not on the RESULTS of doing my best. "When you...devote yourself instead to your rightful duties, you can relax. When you know you've done the best you can under the circumstances, you can have a light heart....In good fortune or adversity, it is the good will with which you perform deeds that matters——not the outcome. So take your attention off of what you think other people think and off of the results of your actions."

Another nettle is feeling frustrated by other people. Epictetus explains that I create my own sense of frustration but I could choose NOT to feel frustrated. "When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it; you can either accept it or resent it. What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance."

Power

Only I can choose my thoughts, values, decisions, and actions. Only I can frame a problem as an opportunity to improve myself. Only I can face the inevitabilities of my own life with equanimity. Only I can avoid feelings of failure by doing my best and then letting go. Only I can take back the power to upset me that I have unwisely ceded to other people and to events and circumstances.
  
Seemingly a philosophy of self-constraint, Epictetus's Stoicism is exactly that, but it is also a philosophy of self-emancipation. "By accepting life's limits and inevitabilities and working with them rather than fighting them, we become free."


Freedom

The ancients voiced a maxim that "Freedom is the knowledge of necessity." Useless resistance to the inevitabilities of life——loss, age, death——entraps me rather than frees me. Clearly understanding and accepting these inevitabilities ironically liberates me from them. I can choose to not live in dread; instead, I can lose my fear. Although Stoic principles demand that I unlearn practically all the behaviors and habits taught during my upbringing, Stoic habits of mind and patterns of behavior give the great gift of freedom from fear. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I have learned from Stoicism that I have now, and I always have had, the power to liberate myself.


Quotations from Epictetus come from the contemporary translation of The Art of Living by Sharon Lebell.

First appeared in The Woodstock Independent



Saturday, February 4, 2017

Not Giving Up on Gardening



Gardening:   
Succeeding Means Not Giving Up

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro
All Rights Reserved


Gardening unearths the paradoxes of life, among them the truth that we are most in control when we accept what we cannot control. Looking at some improbably successful plants in my garden, I remember other, vanquished ones. (Seed catalogs in early spring inspire unwarranted optimism!) Life is just like a garden: plant with hope, some of what you plant takes root, but much does not, and other, surprising successes take over. Accepting what you actually get, rather than insisting on what you planned, is key to joy, in the garden or in life.

Here are some excerpts from my past gardening logs.

Spring

The only flowers up so far in our garden are snowdrops, which I was very pleased to see today, but we do have many other "little bulbs" like scilla, grape hyacinths, and crocuses, as well as wild tulips. Lovely crocuses and snowdrops blooming in our garden always endear themselves to me because I didn't plant them. They are remnants of some previous owner's garden.

Crocuses, hellebores, miniature irises, a last snowdrop or two, scilla, Grecian windflowers or anemones--all were blooming during a lovely sunny Sunday afternoon as we did an hour of garden cleanup. I stared at the flowers to affix their memory because we are returning to cold rain for the upcoming days.

It seems time to voice my annual unspoken wonderment about violets. Why do people mistreat these lovely posies by considering them weeds? I have an area full of blue violets right now and couldn't feel happier about their exuberance. Bloom on, unjustly despised wildflower!

I creaked my way through the weekend after some strenuous garden work digging 24 holes to plant mazus reptans alba as a groundcover asked to invade bare patches on the right of way denuded when the City cut down two ash trees. (Later note:  The mazus reptans disappeared and never bloomed.)  I also pruned out deadwood in the rose garden. My roses being old or antique roses, they bloom only on old wood, but some of the old wood had not leafed out and needed the guillotine. Their executioner also was punished by mosquitoes.

I began to forget a grumpy week by walking in our garden on this beautiful sunny Saturday morning. I was so happy seeing the vegetation that, when a rose prickle sliced into my thumb, it didn't break my good mood. Spring finally is here to stay, it seems. I went outside into the cold, brilliantly sunny morning and wandered to see what the garden needs. I pried out some dandelions with the dandelion fork, pruned some weed trees, admired the flowers. Primroses are blooming like mad, and I have a cherished stand of white guinea hen flowers. We might go buy some seeds or plants later. I have two concrete planters and two three-tiered metal planters. Besides the flower seeds I already have—calendula and four-o'clocks—I'd like to find some nasturtium seeds and petunia plants, maybe a New Guinea impatiens. John needs to pick up some basil plants.
 
Summer

Large stands of Joe Pye weed vie for pride of place with ox-eyed daisy, spiderwort, and my favorite, ironweed. I particularly like ironweed for its purple flowers. Joe Pye weed takes its name from a Native American who used the herb as a medicinal plant. Bees and butterflies flock for treatment.

A cool Sunday--it was a little too cool to hang out on the back porch, but I did weed for a while, pulling 10 gallons worth of a strange clinging, sticky weed, with whorls of skinny leaves interspaced up and down the stem. After I did some research on the Internet, I discovered that my weed is bedstraw. 

I cleaned up a wet, muddy garden for an hour and felt gloriously happy! Large stands of the herbs Joe Pye weed and valerian are flowering; my old-rose bushes are in bud. I must have certain plants: sweet woodruff, borage, southernwood, goatsbeard. All are flourishing except the borage; no signs of it yet.

Autumn

I am enjoying a late-season bloom of flowers. Calendula and four-o'clocks are still going strong, and I am really impressed with the steady performance of New Guinea impatiens. The weirdly beautiful toad lily is just beginning to open up

I noticed some naked ladies in the yard today. No, not the human kind. These are lily-like purple flowers. They got the name because their foliage appears in the spring, and then it disappears, but in late summer, leafless stalks suddenly emerge, bearing purple flowers. These are the Lady Godivas of my garden.

Goldenrod is blooming in our garden this morning, and, to my surprise, another naked lady (amaryllis belladonna) exposed herself in an unexpected area of the yard, and two sweet-pea flowers suddenly appeared! This is especially mystifying because sweet peas supposedly hate hot weather!

Lady's mantle grows next to a mossy rock in our garden, as well in another, self-sown place. Now that I think of it, even the mossy rock plant sowed itself. I had planted the lady's mantle somewhere else in a location of which it apparently did not approve. We can't control even our herbs.

Elizabeth Lawrence's Gardening for Love consists of Lawrence's comments about her many years of correspondence with country women who advertised plants and seeds for sale or exchange in state market bulletins. Well-versed in botanical nomenclature, Lawrence was always trying to figure out the scientific name for the plant or seed in question. But the common names have great charm, as does her book.


First appeared in The Woodstock Independent