The content of Rambling Thoughts is organized into three different series’. These series’ are Stories of a Stoic, Wagers of a Warrior, and The Memoirs of a Moralist.
Stories of a Stoic chronicles my encounters navigating life as a stoic philosopher. Before I discovered stoicism, I suffered from not having a liaison between myself and my world. I was analogous to a boxer, and if life had shots to throw then I was catching them flush in the face. I felt the brunt of every failure, loss, rejection, doubt, and pending despair. Feeling these emotions daily, is assured to (and did) spiral me into a depression. High-school accented this struggle, where the tasks of navigating a basic education provided stress that would spiral me into constant illnesses because I had no coping mechanisms. As I grew older, the stress slightly waned. But it wasn’t so much a matter of me developing coping skills, as it was my challenges becoming more familiar and thus less potent.
But one day three months into college, I was walking to my aunt’s office ( a professor at that institution) on a Monday afternoon. As the sun poured into my face, birds darted and whistled above me, and the heavy traffic of cars and pedestrians and prosaic day-to-day chatter sounded behind me, I noticed something. I was happy. There was nothing essentially remarkable about my day, nor that time, to trigger a feeling which I rarely experienced. Writer Kurt Vonnegut said;
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
I became hyper-aware of my circumstances at that time, and analyzed all possibilities that could account for such elation. And although the setting of college and the freedom of adulthood did immediately trigger, something else did as well. During that walk, I was free of thoughts. This spurned a realization that I would take years to develop further, but when I finally had I was left with a moniker that forever changed my life.
“Thoughts are the root of all suffering.”
My world transformed by realizing that emotions respond to thoughts, nor circumstance. This empowered a cynical teenager who realized that although he may not have control over circumstance, he has control over his thoughts in response to circumstance. From here, I designed personal mechanism and liaisons to tend to my negative thoughts and thus yield brighter feelings. Which thus yields a brighter world. Later, Stoicism was explained to me as a formal teaching in two philosophy classes. It immediately spoke to me, and I buried myself in modern stoic manuals, ancient texts, and various writings which helped me formulate more sophisticated tools. Later after already being entrenched in stoicism, as a psychology major I had discovered cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT emerged from stoicism as a cognitive therapy which acts from the same premise that we respond to thoughts about reality and not reality. CBT acts to identify negative thoughts, augment or replace them, and thus render a better reality.
Stoicism isn’t a skill to manage reality. It’s a skill to transfigure it. And it is to me what a surf board is to a surfer. It’s not an accessory to life, but the prism through which I experience life itself. Because life shouldn’t be endured. It should be cherished.
This series tracks my journey though the world as I develop new skills and transcribe lessons learned, techniques obtained, and experiences I’ve had in an attempt to spread a beautiful teaching.