Stoic Meditation #13 - Adversity, Duty, and Hope

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary." - John Milton

Jan 06, 2025

I journal according to Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" and affectionately, and unimaginatively, call my morning dialog with my muse "The Pages." It's been ages since this exercise has graced the written page and for the past four or so years I've been capturing my ramblings in Obsidian. With the help of a nice little plugin when I open a blank page to begin writing, if there are entries from the same date from the past they will be displayed at the bottom of the page. The freaky bit is that the background music selected at random by the home music server was the same for this date three years ago as it was for today: the title track for "Montana Skies."

The text was even more surprising. What a stellar mood I must have been in to pen this...

Sloggy, sloshy, Jim forced his feet to move, one after the other...sort of. Sometimes they were half-hearted half-steps. But he couldn't stop. It was night. It was cold. But to stop is to die.
There is an odd solitude that comes with grinding it out without the benefit of a clock. A man can convince himself that this is the pattern for the rest of his life and slip into a depressive yet comforting pattern of misery. Each step, the same as the last. All future steps guaranteed to be much like the last. Maybe some just a tiny bit easier. Some just a tiny bit harder. Minute variations that become his world, the daily grind becomes the minute grind.
If he's lucky, hope never appears. When it's that tough, hope just makes the dingy minutia of the grind that much worse. It amplifies the meaningless of the effort. There's hope! Ah, but at what cost to achieve? At what effort and to what end? The minutia grind is hard enough. To lift himself up and away from this slow slog seems like an impossible task. So what gets him to find the juice to make such an effort? It isn't hope. Hope is for suckers.
No. It's something essential. Maybe it isn't in every man, but it's certainly in some men. What's the juice? Where does it come from? How does it get there? What is it? It's ambition. it's a lust for competition against something larger than himself. Something timeless. It's a thirst that rises up and says to him, "Someday I will die and rest my bones. But today is not that day. Today is my day to do battle with the gods and show them that this day, of all days, shall be remembered like no other. This day shall mark the record of my worth, value, and being."
Oh, to be a Stoic. The strange comfort that visits itself on my aching head and says, "Of course you are struggling. Of course you don't feel at the top of your game. It is a day, set forth for you to do with as you will. To squander, to revel in distractions, to sit idle in self-absorbed pity, or to plunge into the fires of the day and forge something great. To begin again is to begin well. To forge the precursor of a future day of brilliance and lasting energy that will sustain you in the future days such is today."
So we begin. Slow. Simple. A cup of coffee. Inspiring music. And one amazingly fantastic sunrise! What glory! I stood outside on the driveway for as long as I could stand the cold in my shirtsleeves and marveled at the beauty, the uniqueness. "Here comes the day! Ready or not!"

Follow-on thoughts...

Clearly, one of my favorite quotes from Seneca was on my mind:

"Today - this day - will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay siege to the gods and shake up the world."
Seneca, Medea, 423-425

Several Stoic ideas are implicit to this little vignette. One is the idea that whatever hardship we may be grinding through, it will end.

"The Seven Wonders of the World, and things far more wonderful than those, which (if such there be) the ambition of succeeding years has brought forth, will one day be seen leveled to the ground. So it is: nothing is everlasting, and few things are long lasting; different things perish in different ways, their endings may be varied, but whatever begins also ceases…. Let him go, he who would mourn departed spirits one by one, who would weep over the ashes of Carthage and Numantia and Corinth – and any place loftier that has fallen – when even this universe, which has no place to fall, is going to perish; let him go, too, he who would complain that Fate, which will one day dare so great a crime, has not spared him!"
Seneca, Consolation to Polybius 1.1–2

Castles, empires, our selves, and even the universe have an end. So, too, with the present toils. But only if we stay a course that is true to our goals and purpose. A second idea is the value or purpose for the struggle.

"Without an adversary, virtue shrivels. We see how great and how powerful it really is, only when it shows by endurance what it is capable of. Be assured that good men should act likewise; they should not shrink from hardships and difficulties, nor complain against fate; we should make the best of whatever happens and turn it to good."
Seneca, On Providence 2.4