A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

I posted recently about my discovery of real treasure in the writing of Lawrence Durrell.  I stand by that.

But now I feel as though I've found something sublime, approaching the divine, perhaps, in ancient Stoicism as written about by William B. Irvine.

Stoicism is a process for achieving complete tranquility and joy.  What could be more sublime than that?

What's incredible is that it just might work, at least for me.  I was surprised by how many principles of Stoicism I have long considered my own: Focusing on my own abilities rather than worrying about things I cannot control, as just one example.

Of course Stoicism prescribes many principles that are new to me.  Perhaps the most important is the daily acknowledgement that everything you have, everything you enjoy, can (and most likely will be) taken away from you.  Maybe in the distant future, or maybe today.

To do this Irvine writes about the importance of negative visualization, the daily ritual of envisioning what your life would be without specific things (or people) that bring you joy.  Imagining what it would be like without these things - and doing so often - helps you not take them for granted.  It helps you appreciate them more deeply, and then blunts the pain from their eventual loss.

Stoicism includes many tools (and I'm surely just scratching the surface after this one book) to help achieve tranquility.  One simple tool, for example, when you feel anger or frustration is to simply think about how miniscule, fleeting and inconsequential your problems are in the context of the timeless universe.  Yes, that other drive cut me off, but what does it really matter in the grand scheme of things (and once again, focus on my action, not theirs).

I'm deeply interested in what Irvine unfolds on Stoicism, and will be exploring it much, much further moving forward.

And discovering Stoicism - an ancient practice - only deepens my interest in continuing to explore the ancient past.  Clearly there were ancient discoveries of sublime importance that have been largely (completely?) lost to the modern world.

Could it be that my discovery of ancient Stoicism is exactly why I was meant to study ancient history?