Potent Patience
Tomorrow’s events:
Prerequisites for Communitas w/ Miriam Mason Martineau. September 29th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Spiritual Mission of America in the Anthropocene w/ Matthew T. Segall. September 29th @ 6:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Painting With Words: Loving Transformation or Something w/ Tim Adalin. September 29th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
Sex, Masculinity, and God w/ Cadell Last, Kevin Orosz & Daniel Dick. September 30th @ 10:30 AM ET. RSVP by clicking the image below.
Cadell Last, Kevin Orosz, and Daniel Dick visit The Stoa to discuss the reality of sexual difference, the embodiment of love, and the fearless confrontation with death.
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September 28, 2020
I want to be sovereign, individuated, enlightened. I want money in the bank, abs under my shirt, and impressive social media metrics. I want to be your thumos-filled Stoic Daddy, who wins your heart with his boyish daemonic charm, and seduces us to communitas. I want to solve the meaning crisis, the meta-crisis, and all those crises. I want to be prepper-ready for the end of the world, and I want to be spiritually ready to begin a new one. I want a home, a child, an ikigai.
I want everything, and I want it now.
Take a deep breath.
This desire for everything—with its itchy immediacy, and a judgy instancy—is taking me away from feeling into the now.
Do I go on monk mode, or beast mode? Do I heed the hand-me-down advice of the stock photo personalities in the self-help industry, or do I outsource my sensemaking and choicemaking to the galaxy brains?
No. I do not want their answers anymore. I have stopped listening to them. I am listening to something else now, and at the moment this something is telling me to chill, be cool, and stop being such a spiritual beta male.
In other words, be patient. This is not being patient in some impotent way, this is a potent patience. One where I sacrifice goals, or at least the expectation that I will achieve them. All those things I want, which are nice to have, I may not achieve. And that is okay, because there is a more important thing to have, and that is what you can have right now. I am referring to virtue of course.
Virtue, or the attempt at it, is what is under my control. That’s that, really. I am not that virtuous, but I desire to be, and I sense I can be. The mother of all virtue is practical reason, and when you reason well, you put reason in its place, and if you listen to that reason, then you get to listen to something else.
I am fondly reminded of the introduction to my favorite book, Demian, by Herman Hesse:
I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams—like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
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