Mind and body and children

Some will tell you that there's no such thing as body, that everything is an illusion created by the mind.

Others will tell you that the mind is simply an extended string of biochemical processes and reactions.  They're probably correct, but being verifiably, scientifically correct isn't always very useful when it comes to broader questions of humanity.

The good life is interconnected, but individualistic

Being yourself is a pretty scary prospect.  The reality of sitting alone with oneself in a room is more than most people can handle.  The idea itself is even a little frightening for some.  If just being temporarily alone with our own thoughts is more than we can handle, how could we even imagine being alone in the world?  And so we build relationships and connections and interconnections, as we should.  Understanding how to separate those connections from our own true selves is one of the primary difficulties involved in figuring out what it means to have a good life.

The banquet of life

Some chapters are boring, some are interesting.  Some people seem to be a little bland, but when they stand up to speak they passionately set forth on their topic.  Grand ideas are floated by some students in the attempt to solve all problems, while others are happy to deal with the details.  You open your mouth and say something interesting, and the next day you open your mouth and sound like an idiot.  You take it as it comes I suppose.  Being in Kingston for classes and discussing interesting ideas with other students always takes me to a little piece from Epictetus that never fails to put a smile on my face:

Remember that you ought to conduct yourself
as if you were at a banquet.
When something is passed around to you
stretch out your hand and take it politely.
If it passes by you, don't ask for it to come back,
it's not its time.
Perhaps there'll be some left when it comes back around.
 (Encheiridion, 15)

The good life isn't ruled by money, false dichotomies

False dichotomies are one of my favorite (I just cursed at my computer because it told me favorite should be spelled favourite) things.  They're one of those things that are so amazingly useful that no one seems to care that they're absolutely nonsensical. Your false dichotomy for the day is:

I would rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable.

The good life isn't ruled by money, part 1

The problem isn't with money, the problem is with you.

The good life is generous

I'm a big friend of lending books.  In some ways, a lot of our social networking ties into that same simple notion, to point our friends towards information that we might think is useful to them.  The idea of giving is vitally important to my understanding of the good life, and there's no better way for me to explain it than to point you towards the words of Kahlil Gibran.  I had planned on using this blog as a way to sort through my own ideas on a subject, but sometimes my own ideas are tied so tightly to my influences that there's no way of separating them.  In those kind of cases I think that the most useful thing to do is to simply reproduce the original rather than run it through my admittedly thin filter.

The following text is from his book The Prophet:

Never too far off, vol2, part 2a, the one where Marcus Aurelius ACTUALLY responds to Hamlet

So, Hamlet has his litany of complaints.  Let's boil them down into a really compressed form:

Is it better to deal with all of the bullshit in life, or to just kill yourself.  It's definitely a better idea to kill yourself, but what if killing yourself sends you straight to Hell?  Going to Hell for all of eternity would definitely be worse than dealing with this crappy life for another fifty or sixty years, so, out of my own cowardice, I'll choose to stay alive in this world rather than risk eternal torment in the next.

Let's look at where all this torment of Hamlet's comes from, and how much of our life is actually the torment that Hamlet said that it is.  After that we should try to ascertain whether dying would actually be better than putting up with life.

Smelly disagreeable old men

Socrates had a lot of problems.  To the left you can see what some artist imagines to be a famous scene from his marriage.  Xanthippe is pouring her chamber pot out over poor old Socrates’ head.


It might have never happened.  Some authors paint Xanthippe as a horrible person, some as a devoted and caring person, and she, like most of us, was probably somewhere in the middle.  If she had wanted to pour out what she had in that pot over Socrates she might have had a reason though.  He largely ignored his family and his hygiene, and he spent the vast majority of his days trying to get people to see that what they believed didn't really make any sense.


Socrates is a person whom we can learn a great deal from, even if we would have never wanted to be around him in person.

Always looking backwards

The checkout line at the grocery store is perhaps one of the most boring places in the world.  It's a non-place really.  You are only there because you aren't at the place you would like to be - at the cashier.  This kind of situation is a dreamland for modern marketers.  Turn your head to the right and you'll see all the hydrogenated corn oil, high fructose corn syrup, and preservatives you can stuff into brightly colored wrappers.  Turn your head to the left and you'll see junk that is even worse for you.  Did Brad really dump Angelina in Nice?  Her thighs really have cellulite?  Is that a baby bump?

Where did our carefully protected individual control over our lives go in that short bit of time? To paraphrase Epictetus, "If a person gave your body away to a stranger walking down the road, you would certainly be angry, and yet you feel no shame in handing over your own mind."