Winning Together
March 8th, 2021
This will maybe be my second last entry here. My next entry, and possibly my last one, will be on March 21st, which is the one year anniversary of The Stoa. That is when the “Maybe the End of The Stoa Party” is happening.
My credence level about The Stoa ending was around 5% over the last few weeks, but I was fantasizing about making this place a one-year “sand mandala” again on Friday. I was fantasizing about this because I have been feeling funky lately. It is one of those funky feelings that in the moment I know will be deemed as a necessary funk in retrospect.
I just counted how many entries I've written here since starting almost a year ago: 290. If we include this journal and the possible last one, that will bring it to 292. That is a lot of writing. I've tried to write my best here. I wrote earnestly, with love, and perhaps with some cringe. I do not know how to make sense of all of these entries. This whole thing did start with me going a little mad.
I received this email from Bonnitta the other day:
The Stoa is a work of genius and madness (the madness of the lockdown). It has lockdown energy. Thinking about it in this way is really fascinating. It's a constraint that built something that we learn from, that kept us moving and kept us from fighting with each other, and gives us refuge from the loneliness. But it still has something "demi-real" (Bhaskar's term) about it, and I think that is the lockdown factor.
Lockdown energy. That feels right. The first entry here was called “COVID-19,” and that was basically the last time I wrote about the virus. I do not even know what is happening with the pandemic to be honest, as I have been too busy doing stuff at The Stoa. I think I finally have lockdown fatigue though.
I am so tired of wearing a mask, especially now with my epic beard. I look wild as shit with these fucking masks on. I am ready for this lockdown to be over. I miss going to coffee shops and bars. I miss hanging out with friends. I miss having philosophical meet-ups in person. I am going to pause here though, because I am indulging too much with a complaining energy.
I am incredibly grateful for all the crazy and wonderful things that have happened thanks to this lockdown. I would not have had the opportunity to encounter all of you, and for that alone this stewardship has been worthwhile. Now is not the time to get lazy though, as there will be collective challenges for us on the horizon. Now is the time to seriously play. Now is the time to win, which was something I was thinking about a lot yesterday.
That trauma processing thing I did last week seemed to have an internal chain reaction. I went on a long solo walk yesterday for a few hours to process some of this, and that gave me an opportunity to internally visit a part of me that still felt like a loser. This part of me has existed for a long while.
Feeling like a loser was a pretty salient thing for most of my life. Being brutally rejected socially when I was young helped with that, and struggling to do well in school probably was also a factor. It is a feeling that I managed to intrapersonally mask, and I managed to work around it, in order to be somewhat effective.
The feeling was pretty strong yesterday. I could not deek or sneak around it. I realized how much automaticity was surrounding this feeling, all that “deadliness of doing” stuff gets actuated right away. Yesterday I just stayed with it though, and there was no goal to achieve or plan to implement or clever machinations I could do that could make it go away.
So I stayed with the feeling, and a sense of transmutation slowly started to happen. I felt deep within this loser feeling, and within it there was a seed of being a winner. Not the rivalrous kind of winner, where you have to be better than other people, but the non-rivalrous kind of winner, where you play finite games in service to the infinite games at play.
There are so many things I want to be winning at. Sure, I have been doing a lot this year, and I have accomplished something decent enough with this project. Due to this embedded loser thing that has been quietly haunting me though, I have been operating in a compromised way, and throughout the year my thumos felt frustrated, and not cleanly channeled. If I would put a percentage on how I have been “potentializing,” it has only been around 40-60%.
I sense that is going to change now. I feel like winning now, from a deeper place, and not from that “ameliorate feeling like a loser” place. Winning can be beautiful, and I want to win a beautiful life, and I do not think this is a selfish want, as I sense I will be of service towards beautifying the world while attempting to do so.
Let us win a more beautiful life together. Yeah, these were the journals of a crazy (maybe) Stoic, who wrote endlessly about the daemon, thumos, and being cool with the unknown. So many people have told me these journals were inspiring to them. It is weird for me to hear this. Writing these were painful at times, and I wrestled often with the vulnerability afterglow after submitting an entry to thousands of people, most of whom I do not know.
I do not know what is going to happen next in my story. You probably do not know what is going to happen next in your story. That is why we are here, authoring our lives together, in our own way. I am getting a little teary-eyed writing this. I do not know why. I want to write one last thing though …
Thank you for being here.
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