Questioning Scale
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath: Sunrise Edition w/ Steve Beattie. Every Monday @ 6:15 AM ET.RSVP here.
Metamodern Deep-Dives: Art, Spirituality, Sexuality, and Faith w/ Daniel Görtz. October 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th. 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Living with the Global Problematique w/ Peter Jones. October 5th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Digital Porch w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger. October 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th. 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Rap Unbattles w/ Tyson Wagner. Every Monday from October 5th to October 26th. RSVP here.
Newly posted event:
Settler Sexualities w/ Kim TallBear. November 6th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
Concept Unfolding w/ Nicolas Benjamin. October 6th @ 6:30 PM ET. RSVP to the link below.
Nicolas Benjamin, also known as “the most interesting man at The Stoa,” revisits for another session of Concept Unfolding. You can watch the first session here.
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October 4, 2020
I slept in today, and woke up around 11 AM. I am feeling very fatigued, and it feels like I am coming down with something. Maybe it is just a common cold, but my mind does go to COVID.
Fatigue is a common symptom, and Ontario has seen a spike of cases: the Premier of Ontario announced that we are in the second wave last week, and public health measures are intensifying. I have not been going out much, besides short walks with Camille, and I am pretty sure you cannot catch COVID via Zoom, so I do not think I have it. In any case, it is something to be Stoically prepared for.
When my body is weak like this, I do not feel the thumos, and when I do not feel the thumos, my mind does not think big. I do not want to write about stealing or seducing the culture, and I do not want to think about any grand potential that this place may have. I want to think modest, and do modest things, then go back to bed.
I finally got to “inbox zero” last night, after a week of having unanswered emails, and woke up to 18 new emails. I need a better relationship with this email thing, as it is starting to feel like pulling virtual weeds, and that is not a good association to have when people are emailing you nice things. Maybe there are some new processes I need to develop, e.g. only check emails at a certain time, or maybe it is a new mental frame I need to adopt.
I need better relationships with lots of things besides email, including food, my body, money, social media, my parents, my schedule, my avatar in the spectacle, and the expectations of The Stoa: my own expectations and other people's expectations. Related to all this, I received this email the other day: I know you are doing a lot of delegating, and supporting emerging leadership. But the load on the central node seems pretty high still.
The central node being me, and yes it is high. A lot of people are reaching out willing to help, and I do not really know what to do with that, because I do not really know what I need help with. People are administratively helping though, such as Raine Revere, who is leading a small project of revamping the website.
I am getting a sense that I am being a bottleneck for this thing to scale, or maybe I am being perceived as such. The problem I find with the previous sentence though is the word “scale.” So many people seem scale crazy, myself included, especially when my thumos is running loose.
What are we trying to scale exactly?
There is this quote from Philippa Foot that I really love: You ask a philosopher a question and after he or she has talked for a bit, you don't understand your question any more. That is going to happen here if I keep writing about this scaling question.
I am too fatigued to continue on this thread though, as this is going to require more considered words than my mind can muster at the moment. I will leave with a few questions, which is not only for myself to consider but it is for anybody who has started to form some attachment to “the potential” of this place:
What do you want from The Stoa? Feel into that. Maybe it is multifaceted, maybe there are egoic aspects, walking hand-in-hand with daemonic aspects. What if what you want is not meant to happen here? Feel into that. What kind of emotions does that invoke?
Now, for a more juicy question: what does The Stoa want from you? Or maybe better said, what does this attractor—that The Stoa is serving as a placeholder for—want from you?
***
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