Stoicus Pater
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December 17th, 2020
In a recent Zoom session, somebody wrote my name in the chat but misspelled it as “pater,” which is Latin for father. I looked up the word, and saw this: a title or honorific applied to a male community leader.
She followed up asking if it was a Freudian slip. Evan jumped in, and bestowed me with an epic honorific ...
Stoicus Pater.
Stoicus is Latin for Stoic, hence Stoic Father. I owned the honorific immediately. Happenstance coinage like this does not come around often and when it does, a man must take action.
This honorific is way more mature than the Stoic Daddy thing. I’ve wanted to retire the daddy title for a while now, but people seemed to like it. More so women, some of whom expressed desire for me to keep it unretired. It was a few dudes that conveyed it made them feel uncomfortable. This is fair and understandable.
I’d be uncomfortable as well if I were in a space where the main guy called himself Stoic Daddy, and was not shy to express his horniness in his journals to himself. So yeah, the more mature Stoicus Pater it is.
But man, the pervert in me still wants to keep the daddy thing, as it does express a truth that would be inauthentic to hide. I sense a repurposed motto will best express how I should proceed: Stoicus Pater in the streets, Stoic Daddy in the sheets.
That feels right. So when you see me in the Zoom room, firmly holding space, you’ll know you are in the presence of Stoicus Pater, but when you see a devilish smirk flash across my face, after making a joke at the knife’s edge of appropriateness, you’ll know Stoic Daddy is here too.
In all seriousness though, this new honorific feels timely, because in the next phase of this project I will take a more fatherly role in the stewarding process. In an earlier entry I was musing about the title “steward” I gave myself, which I randomly selected ...
I did some Wikipedia research into the etymology of the word. "In medieval times, the steward was a servant who supervised both the lord's estate and his household." This feels right. And when my new friend says that there is an implication of a loose grip on the process, that also feels right.
I ended the entry with …
My ego just let out a sigh. I have to let The Stoa go. Or, better put, I have to let go of the thought that I ever had it. A steward does not own his lord's house.
Yes, the grip will be loose, and it will be gripped as if I do not own this thing. I will not be shy or obfuscate that I am the one doing the gripping though. I might end this project on its one year anniversary, which is on March 21st. It will exist until then, and I am going to be more fatherlike in my stewarding role during this potential last phase.
You may not like it, and that is okay. Nobody is entitled to have this place suit their liking, including Stoicus Pater. If you have enjoyed the fruits of my discernment thus far, then I invite you to come along for the ride, and I do trust your discernment to jump off anytime.
That is part of the beauty of this place; people come and people go, in and out of the digital colonnade, and only this steward stays, with a loose grip, to ensure everything is in the right relationship.
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