240122 What I learned in my studies this morning 4*

Another day dawns
With lessons to plan and prep.
Teaching is so fun!

Today's Meditation(s):

(And no, my-ku up there is not sarcastic. I genuinely do enjoy teaching my kids.)

Annnnnd another post gets pushed to the next day.  I'm sensing a pattern here....

I'm one chapter into Hadot's Inner Citadel and am enjoying it a lot.  It's fun to learn about the idiosyncrasies of Marcus' life and the speculations on when / how / why it was written, when the Emperor first truly adopted philosophy as life, etc. I could read about this stuff all the time.

But . . . that's not what philosophy is for, for me.  Philosophy is for living, for changing, for improving myself. Academic philosophy, on the other hand, is for entertainment and not meant to be taken too seriously.

(Wish I'd known that in my grad school days. I thought all the navel-gazing I was doing was Important. Quick! Parse this paragraph to within an inch of it's life! What does is mean? Is there a mathematical way to write this book-long argument?)

So I return to the same lessons over and over, hoping that some day I might internalize, understand, and put them into practice (more fully, more consistently):

• Discern what is up to me and what is not up to me
• Actively use wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.  Add kindness.
• Find and follow Nature.
• Try to understand and forgive others.

Those basic Stoic themes and more probably appear hundreds of times in the 1145 posts I've written on this blog.  Now's it's hundreds and 1.