Amor Fati and all that.
Confessions of a failed Stoic.
I t wasn’t until several years after I lost my business in the 2008 financial crisis that I discovered stoicism. To cut a very long story short, the gist of which you can read here, I took a large risk by selling my house to move abroad, set up a business and promptly lost it all, and it wasn’t until I discovered stoicism that I was finally able to come to terms with my past ‘mistakes’.
I started to read avidly the stoic classics such as Epictetus’s Enchiridion, Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, his work on the Shortness of Life, as well as other classics such as Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
My favourite of all, although he is not really considered a classic of the genre, is Michelle de Montaigne. I have his complete works and find his writing to be extremely readable and inspiring, page after page. When it comes to erudition, life’s most intimate of observations and knowledge of the Ancients, Montaigne is hard to beat. When he writes, it’s almost as if you’re sitting right beside him — every word, every sentence has been deeply considered before it is committed to the page. It is said that he had a large influence on Shakespeare and it’s not hard to see why.
I found them all to be powerful, inspiring and refreshing. In short, stoicism allowed to me to not give a fuck about what was happening to me. It allowed me to come to terms with the world, myself, the people in it and accept that life isn’t the past or the future but the here and the now, and that it is imperative to live each day as if it were your last.
Stoicism gave me the peace of mind to realise that your past ‘mistakes’ aren’t really mistakes at all — they’re just part of life and therefore should be fully embraced as such.
That was all well and good until this year when the shit really hit the fan in my life. Again, I won’t bore you with the details from the above link, but suffice to say that my stoicism was truly put to the test, and I’m disappointed to report that I was left wanting. Allow me to explain why.
Many things came home to roost this year, the foremost of which was my almost complete isolation from society. By that I mean that over the years I had severed my ties with just about all my friends and family, in large part due to my continuing battle with depression, and in part due to the shame of suffering from it in the first place. The other part was the mental breakdown that my wife suffered and which I struggled to deal with — for the last few years, she had been the crutch in my life and suddenly it was pulled away from under me and I duly fell. All that not-giving-a-shit about the injustices of life flew right out of the window and I was left severely wanting.
I started to look into the past again and found it filled with self-loathing and self-pity, about as un-stoic as one can get, and I hated myself for letting it get this far. It was a downward spiral and I was sinking fast. It felt as if the stoic lifeblood within me was draining away, right in front of my eyes.
It really wasn’t until this summer that I started to recover again. I got back in touch with some of my family, admittedly with mixed results. One long-lost friend even looked me up and we chatted. He said that the reason he got in touch after all these years was because I had had a profound effect on his life, albeit we only knew each other for a short period of time. I was touched, began to feel strong again and re-examined the cornerstones of stoicism that had held me together over the years, namely:
Amor Fati — Love and embrace your fate. Don’t live in regret. Life is what it is. Move on and try not to make the same mistakes again.
Memento Mori –remember that you can die at any moment and that you should live each day to the full. Don’t look to the past or the future since there’s nothing you can do about the former and very little you can do to influence the latter.
We are now in the second half of a truly horrific year but I’m glad to say that I’m starting to find my stoic feet again. I have started to look at the things I’m grateful for rather that looking at the negatives, namely:
- I’m in great health.
- I have a loving wife and daughter who are also in great health.
- We have a roof over our heads and can afford to feed ourselves.
- We live in a stable country with an excellent standard of living.
Finally, I can say with some pride: “I am a recovering stoic!”
