Do Not Let Your Hands Drop Down
Updates: Steve Beattie is offering another Stoic Breath @ 7:00 AM ET tomorrow and Buster Benson, author of Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement, is visiting The Stoa’s Social Design Club tomorrow.
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Wed @ 7:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Social Design Club w/ Freyja and Joe Edelman. Every Wednesday @ 1:30 PM ET. RSVP here. Join the club here. 90 mins.
Raw Sexuality: Sacred Sex w/ Chester Brown. July 22nd @ 4:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Breaking the Frame w/ Travis Mann. Every Wednesday @ 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
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July 21, 2020
I was talking to Jacob yesterday, a regular at The Stoa. He is a Jehovah's Witness who has extensively studied the scriptures, and from what I’ve seen he is a pretty eclectic dude. I like him. He said it seems like I am carrying a burden, and he liked that about me.
I do not know if what he said was right but something about it felt right. After our conversation he emailed me this passage which I assume is from the Bible: And you, be courageous and do not let your hands drop down, because there exists a reward for your activity.
I appreciate these encouragements. I savour them. I am not living a life of abject hardship, nor do I want to turn this entry to some dudebro hardship status jockeying. I do want to write about hardship though, and I want to write about it as authentically as I can.
Hardship. A state of privation. I desire to be in the right relationship with this state. I am sad to say that my felt-sense default is probably the wrong relationship with this state. This is why I am a Stoic or at least trying to be one, and these Stoic-ish journals are about reminding myself of perennial truths.
Epictetus was right when he said: You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity. We are always in relationship—with things, ideas, people, ourselves. It is the wrong move to expect happiness in these relationships.
The right move is to expect punches to be thrown at you, and if you are surprised by getting punched you will get knocked out. Hardship is ever-present. Lean into it with wide-open eyes. Comfy living is not where greatness is born. It is not the type of life where character is built.
If you are going to live, live right, and living right is about saying yes to all of life, especially the part where you feel like you are carrying a burden. Do not let those hands drop down. There is no gym to build one’s character, so build one. In the meantime, life provides no shortage of obstacles, and every good Stoic knows that obstacles are the way.