210813 What I learned in my studies this morning

Celebration time!

Lights fantastic trip themselves

To honor my love.

Daily Stoic:

Ain't that the truth?

How many times have I failed to try something because I invented an irrational fear about it?

Maybe I thought I would fail when experience should have told me that chances were good that I could.  Maybe I was afraid of the outcome when a more rational approach would have shown me that chances were good my worst-case-scenario would never happen.  Or maybe I was anxious about what others would think of me when chances were good that they don't think of me at all and, if they do, I should not care for oh so many reasons.

It's a hard habit to break, but I must make the effort.  I am wasting too much potential and losing too many opportunities to keep going this way.

Today's Meditation:

From Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, Letter XLVIII:

Longer and deeper than most of the letters so far, XLVIII is wondermaking. It is a discussion of friendship and of the purpose of philosophy.

Aside: I live for this sort of thing. It fills me with joy to read thoughts like these. 

True friendship is living part of your life for another.  Without this bond, this commitment, this sacrifice, it isn't really friendship.

If I think of myself more than my friend, I am not the friend I think I am.  

I like to believe I have this one down fairly well, but I know I'm not perfect and I sometimes fail this test, using friends for my own purposes rather than theirs.

As always when I feel I am doing well in some moral commission, I need be doubly on guard lest I take it for granted and find myself sorely lacking in this duty someday.  Friends deserve better.

Seneca is condemning sophistry, ivory tower navel-gazing, and facetious analytical philosophy here.  

Philosophy, to the Stoics, is an active thing, concrete rather than ideal.  It is meant to help us navigate the world and our place in it, especially where moral duty and our relations to others are concerned.

Word games, overdefinitionalizing, and the like not only fail to give us guidance in these areas, they specifically take away from what time and effort we could be using to become more virtuous people.

Complicated language is usually used because the author or speaker (a) does not fully understand the topic they are discussing, (b) they are trying to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn, or, and this is by far the least likely of the bunch, (c) the topic actually is complicated and the speaker isn't capable (through the innate difficulty of the subject or their own insufficient verbal ability) of expressing it any other way.

K.I.S.S. is good.

It's also the mark of a superior mind.