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My last blog entry praised Sara Bakewell’s text “How to Live” which was based on Montaigne’s essays. Many who read the blog and then found motivation in reading the text reported that they not only felt a kinship with Montaigne’s reflections from over 500 years ago, but also realized the through-lines of life lived then with live lived now. For this blog, I wanted us to go back a few thousand years to realize that the human condition across culture and time can be embodied by wisdom that is forever.
Lao Tzu in 600BC China said that the sage “is ready to use all situations and doesn’t waste anything. This is called embodying the light.”
For today, this means being adaptive and flexible. In today’s world that is changing so rapidly within so many domains including economic, political, social, and environmental, it is important to be able to mobilize one’s resources to address the challenges that will present themselves no matter how overwhelming they may be. Humans have been so successful given their adaptive ability niching almost every climate and geography on the planet. And if we were unable to adapt to an environment, we often made the environment adapt to us. Mind you, this has had tremendous consequences to the environment and to other cultures , but it has created a planet that now holds 7 billion people for better or for worse.
Siddhartha in 500 BC India simply stated that “Suffering exists.”
In the United States, the popular cultural narrative is that if something is not “fine” something is wrong. Life in fact is full of ups and downs and being “fine” is not the default way of being in life. When we accept that suffering is part of life and not some sort of illness or pathology that needs to be remedied immediately, it can make us more prepared to understand that this is life experience for all of us on this planet…it is nothing to be ashamed of; to hide; or to run from. Rather it is just part of the journey.
Socrates in 450BC Greece said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Understanding oneself, one’s motivations, hopes, dreams, and fears, Socrates argued, is the responsibility we have to ourselves.
While today we sometimes spend too much time thinking of the self (and self-consciousness, modern science tells us, is a fast road to unhappiness), we all have an opportunity to reflect on who we are and how we want to be in the world. Being reactive to external triggers without understanding why leads us to be at the whim of the external world more so than we already are. Self-examination is not easy and does not always feel good, but it is for many the path to insight and a sense of understanding that may equate with freedom.
Epicurus in 300 BC Greece stated “The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.”
Epicurus celebrated living life, but warned that the pursuit of pleasure in of itself and pleasures that are not satiable can lead to ruin. I have often worked with individuals who have pursued the meta-narrative that more is better (homes, cars, sex, money, things) and is the answer to happiness. Yet for many, once attained there is often a large price to be paid in having forgone community, connections, friendships, and family relationships. These individuals feel cheated that they did not receive the bounty of joy and happiness that they had been promised. Consumption run amok is not the answer to a life well-lived. In fact, researchers have shown that the amount of happiness the average person has in comparison to the wealthiest of the wealthy is infinitesimal. Pleasure is wonderful; obsessing about pleasure reduces its enjoyment.
