Donald J. Robertson

Great article! I enjoyed reading your personal reflections on emotional resiliency. Well done!

Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been. — Marcus Aurelius

When I was younger — in my mid-20s — I had a very strong, ego driven, sense of entitlement about my feelings. However, if you asked me to tell you about myself, I would have said that, of course, I was the most humble person you’d ever meet. I was deluding myself, though.

I remember being in a squabble back then with a family member, about some work I was doing for them. I told them: You know, it really hurts you would say that!

This wasn’t the first time I’d said this in response to a statement, a critique of my performance, based merely on opinion. I thought I was putting on my “big girl pants” by being honest about my feelings. I basked in the triumphant feeling of being vulnerable and transparent! Surely these were the behaviors of someone wise beyond their years! Such bravery!

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Time projection can be an easy way to use cognitive therapy at home

Time projection can be an easy way to use cognitive therapy at home

I began practicing as a psychotherapist in the mid-1990s. I studied many different approaches. I used to train other therapists and became known as a psychological “techniques guy” because I was fascinated by the variety of psychological strategies and tactics we can learn.

You’ll find psychological techniques in books on psychotherapy, as well as in self-help books and even spiritual and philosophical classics. Each individual technique can be classified in different ways. For instance, is it broadly visual, meditative, cognitive, verbal, written, or behavioral in nature? Some are quite complex. Others are surprisingly easy to learn, and work pretty reliably — they often provide “easy wins” for therapists.

I’ll let you in on a trade secret. Most experienced psychotherapists know that one such easy win is what we call “time projection”. That’s the terminology used by early cognitive-behavioral therapists, although you’ll find similar techniques in lots of other types of books. Time projection is a vague term that refers to using your imagination to shift your perspective as if you’re in the future or the past. There many different ways of doing this. Some work better than others. Let me give you my favorite example…

When a client comes into my consulting room I normally begin by asking “How are things?” One young woman, in Scotland, looked at me strangely for a moment and then said “I’m still in shock, to be honest!” (I’m disguising certain details, to anonymize the client.) She told me that the day before she’d gone to her boyfriend’s apartment. He wasn’t expecting her but, some time ago, had given her a key so she let herself in. She found him in bed with another woman. That would have been bad enough, but a heated argument ensued and the other woman attacked her physically, scratching and badly bruising her face. Her boyfriend stood by and did nothing to defend her. Eventually, she fled the scene in tears.

Doing Time Projection

We talked about it for a while. She felt very humiliated. Often clients are depressed about things that aren’t all that bad or worried about things that never happen. This situation wasn’t like that, though. It would obviously be very emotionally painful for anyone to have that experience. So I began by normalizing her distress and letting her know that I understood how she felt. We were probably a good 20 or 30 minutes into the conversation before I felt it was appropriate to shift perspective.

“How do you think you’ll feel about this tomorrow, looking back on it?” I asked. She told me she might be a bit calmer but still shocked and confused. So we talked a bit more. “How about a week from now — will you feel any different looking back on it then?” She said she’d feel bad but would probably be starting to think more about moving on. “So what about a month from now or two months from now?” She’d have gotten over the shock and be focusing on the future. “What about a year from now?”, “Ten years from now?”, and so on… You get the idea.

Arnold Lazarus, one of the pioneers of modern behavior therapy used the same strategy on himself:

“Whenever I upset myself over various issues […] I always picture myself looking back at the incident from about six months in the future. I instantly realise that a few months from now (or sometimes even a few days from now) it will make very little difference. This produces instant relief. I say “Tough luck!” and go about my business.”— In the Mind’s Eye, 1977

You can use this method of time projection with anything, any perceived catastrophe or misfortune. It works about 90% of the time. Very occasionally someone might say that even twenty years from now they’d still be really upset so you’d either talk that through or switch to another technique — it’s the exception that proves the rule. Because this way of doing time projection is so quick and simple and works so well, you don’t need a therapist to do it for you. You can easily use it yourself at home, as a form of self-help.

Getting More Benefit

There are ways to “squeeze more therapy” out of the technique, though, as I like to say. I often ask clients: “So if you’d feel that way about it if it had happened a year ago, why shouldn’t you feel the same way about what just happened a day ago?” (Assuming the “catastrophe” was the day before.) That’s a puzzling question for most people. It’s worth chewing over, though. What’s done is done, to paraphrase Lady Macbeth, and what’s beyond remedy should be beyond regret.

You might say that’s interesting but the experience is still fresh so you don’t yet feel as removed from it as you would in the distant future. Every time you project yourself into the future, though, you get a glimpse of what it would feel like, looking back. Practice makes perfect so if you keep doing that, maybe once per day or more, you’ll get into the habit of feeling more as if you’ve already moved on.

In a sense, you’re just speeding up the natural process of adapting to setbacks and recovering from them. It puts things in perspective. As an added bonus, time projection also tends to encourage people to think creatively about coping strategies.

If you start by imagining yourself in the future having moved on, you can more easily imagine how you got there. What must you do in order to recover from the problem and reach that new perspective? Maybe you spoke to your friends about how you were feeling, for instance, and started making changes in your daily life. It’s long been understood that focusing on ways of coping, both practically and emotionally, tends to relieve emotional distress.

Make It a Habit

Sometimes cognitive therapy techniques can be complicated. Sometimes, though, we make them more complicated than they need to be. This particular way of doing time projection is so simple that anyone can use it. Arnold Lazarus was one of the pioneers of this approach in the cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) field.

However, it isn’t just a modern concept. The ancient Stoic philosophers — such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — were doing similar things, as I describe in my book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor:

“Another simple and powerful technique is to ask yourself how you would feel about the situation that worries you in ten or twenty years’ time, looking back on it from the future. It’s an example of a more general strategy known as “time projection.” In other words, you can help yourself develop a philosophical attitude toward adversity by asking “If this will seem trivial to me twenty years from now, then why shouldn’t I view it as trivial today instead of worrying about it as if it’s a catastrophe?” You’ll often find that shifting your perspective in terms of time can change how you feel about a setback by making it seem less catastrophic”.

For example, Marcus Aurelius likes to remind himself of things that people took great pride in, or worried about, in the distant past. Decades or even centuries later, to others looking back on events from the past, their concerns may seem less important. Marcus tells himself that whenever he sees the statue of one of his predecessors in the office of emperors, such as Augustus or Hadrian, he should imagine himself in their shoes, and realize that one day many of his own concerns will seem like nothing.

“Then let this thought be in your mind, “Where then are those men now?” Nowhere, or nobody knows where. For thereby you will continuously look at human things as smoke and nothing at all, especially if you reflect at the same time that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time.” — Meditations, 10.31

I’ve known many people who figured out similar strategies for themselves — it just came to them intuitively. It’s worth practicing these sorts of techniques when you don’t need them so that they come more easily to you when you do. In other words, asking yourself “How will I feel about this looking back on it years from now?” is a good habit to get into.

Time projection can be an easy way to use cognitive therapy at home

I began practicing as a psychotherapist in the mid-1990s. I studied many different approaches. I used to train other therapists and became known as a psychological “techniques guy” because I was fascinated by the variety of psychological strategies and tactics we can learn.

You’ll find psychological techniques in books on psychotherapy, as well as in self-help books and even spiritual and philosophical classics. Each individual technique can be classified in different ways. For instance, is it broadly visual, meditative, cognitive, verbal, written, or behavioral in nature? Some are quite complex. Others are surprisingly easy to learn, and work pretty reliably — they often provide “easy wins” for therapists.

I’ll let you in on a trade secret. Most experienced psychotherapists know that one such easy win is what we call “time projection”. That’s the terminology used by early cognitive-behavioral therapists, although you’ll find similar techniques in lots of other types of books. Time projection is a vague term that refers to using your imagination to shift your perspective as if you’re in the future or the past. There many different ways of doing this. Some work better than others. Let me give you my favorite example…

Read the rest of this article on Medium.

Google “Demosthenes waves”. There are several paintings of this scene.

What did Marcus Aurelius say about our reasons to be cheerful?

What did Marcus Aurelius say about our reasons to be cheerful?

Live your whole life through free from all constraint and with utmost joy in your heart… — Meditations, 7.68

Many people assume that ancient Stoic philosophers such as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius were a grave and joyless lot. However, that’s a misconception. In fact, the Historia Augusta tells us that, despite his “serious and dignified” bearing as emperor, Marcus was “without gloom” and known for his pleasant and genial nature.

We can actually see direct evidence of the warmth of Marcus’ affection for his friends. It truly shines forth in the private letters which survive between Marcus and his rhetoric tutor, and family friend, Fronto — such, for example, the charming letter Marcus sent Fronto on his birthday. According to the ancient historians, Marcus had a circle of long-standing friends who loved him very dearly, and based on his surviving correspondence that seems easy to imagine. He was a serious man, but also cheerful and very affectionate.

Marcus himself likewise refers to joy, cheerfulness, love, friendship, and other positive emotions throughout The Meditations, his notebook of personal philosophical reflections. He says, among other things, that he learned how to remain “cheerful when ill, or in the face of any other predicament”, from one of his Stoic mentors (1.5). Applying Stoicism to his own life, he tells himself to be unafraid of death and to meet his fate, not complaining, but “with a truly cheerful mind and grateful to the gods with all your heart” (2.3).

Marcus was perceived as serious but never downcast by others, exhibited warmth and affection to his friends, and, in his private life, valued the cultivation of a cheerful philosophy of life.

Elsewhere, he says that a good person is one who “loves and welcomes all that happens to him” and preserves the guardian spirit within him throughout life “in cheerful serenity, and following God” (3.16). Moreover, he does so by “living a simple, modest, and cheerful life”, free from anger, and accepting of his fate (3.16). Indeed, once he has grasped the right course of action in life he is to “follow it with a cheerful heart and never a backward glance” (10.12). So based on the evidence, Marcus was perceived as serious but never downcast by others, exhibited warmth and affection to his friends, and, in his private life, valued the cultivation of a cheerful philosophy of life.

The Philosophy of Joy

So what would a cheerful philosophy of life look like according to the Stoics? In general, they sought to replace unhealthy emotions with healthy ones, such as rational and proportionate feelings of joy and good cheer, even in the face of adversity. Marcus actually lists three main sources of such joy in Stoicism. These follow a threefold system of classification that runs through The Meditations, dividing our attitudes into those concerning (i) our own self, (ii) other people , and (iii) the events which befall us, throughout life.

Different people find their joy in different things; and it is my joy to keep [i] my ruling centre unimpaired, and [ii] not turn my back on any human being or [iii] on anything that befalls the human race, but to look on all things with a kindly eye, and welcome and make use of each according to its worth. (8.43)

As the French scholar Pierre Hadot pointed out in his seminal work The Inner Citadel, these three categories may also correspond with the cardinal virtues of Stoicism.

1. Wisdom is linked with our relationship to our own true self, which for Stoics is synonymous with our “ruling faculty” (hegemonikon), or reason.

2. Justice, has to do with how we relate to other individuals, and the rest of humankind in general.

3. Courage and Moderation, have to do with mastering our fears and desires, and our ability to cope rationally with the events that befall us in our daily lives.

Let’s consider each of these in turn.

1. Joy in Ourselves

Marcus says in the quote above that “it is my joy to keep my ruling centre unimpaired”. He means that, first and foremost, Stoics take joy in the freedom of their own minds, specifically their faculty of reason. Freedom from what? Well, from fear and desire, or excessive attachment to external things. This basically means that Stoics cherish and take delight in their own ability to live consistently in accord with reason, not without passion, but unimpeded by passion.

Elsewhere, Marcus similarly says that our rational nature finds peace of mind in contemplating its own virtuous actions (7.28). This is the most important of the three sources of Stoic joy, and the other two depend upon it. It refers to the inner sense satisfaction that comes from the awareness that you’re living in accord with your core values or, in this case, the Stoic virtues.

Marcus comes back to this theme time and time again in The Meditations. The only true good, for Stoics, is our own virtue, and the only true evil is our own vice. The wise man therefore orients himself to his own self-improvement, and monitors his inner progress toward wisdom and virtue. The Stoics don’t want us to prize anything more highly than wisdom and virtue — our greatest good, in other words, must become our greatest joy.

2. Joy in Others

The next best thing to achieving virtue ourselves is contemplating it, or at least its seeds or potential, in others. That’s largely how we learn philosophy in the first place, after all. Marcus’ second source of joy is therefore “not to turn my back on any human being” but rather to look on all of humanity with a kindly eye, and make use of each and every man according to his worth.

In the first book or chapter of The Meditations, Marcus lists the qualities he most admires in certain of his tutors and family members. He conveniently explains the rationale for this later in the same text:

When you wish to delight yourself, think of the virtues of those who live with you. For instance, the activity of one, and the modesty of another, and the liberality of a third, and some other good quality of a fourth. For nothing delights so much as the examples of the virtues, when they are exhibited in the morals of those who live with us and present themselves in abundance, as far as is possible. Hence we must keep them before us. — Meditations, 7.28

He makes a conscious effort not only to focus on the character strengths of those he greatly admires, such as his adoptive father the emperor Antoninus Pius, but also to identify positive qualities in those about whom he has mixed feelings, such as his adoptive brother, the emperor Lucius Verus.

Marcus not only thinks about these qualities, though, but takes time to write them down. I think it’s clear that he’d done this exercise repeatedly, e.g., because later in The Meditations we find him listing other qualities of Antoninus Pius in the same way. The Stoics knew that by studying the virtues of others we would encourage ourselves not only to take inspiration from them but to model what’s best in them, emulating their virtues in our own lives. As we’ve seen, though, Marcus also considers the contemplation of other people’s virtues to be one of the most important sources of healthy joyful feelings in life.

3. Joy in External Events

Finally, we are not to turn our back either “on anything that befalls the human race”, but to look on even those things with a kindly eye, and welcome and make use of each event rationally, according to its true value. This is what people today tend to call Stoic amor fati, or love of one’s fate.

Elsewhere in The Meditations, Marcus provides a surprisingly nuanced psychological explanation of how Stoics take joy in external events:

Do not think of things that are absent as though they were already at hand, but pick out the [the best] from those that you presently have, and with these before you, reflect on how greatly you would have wished for them if they were not already here. At the same time, however, take good care that you do not fall into the habit of overvaluing them because you are so pleased to have them, so that you would be upset if you no longer had them at some future time. — Meditations, 7.27

This is a psychological strategy for the deliberate cultivation of gratitude. The Greek words for gratitude (charis) and joy (chara) are closely-related. To be grateful for our health, for instance, is to take a kind of joy or happiness in the fact that we’re experiencing it, while accepting that it’s not entirely under our control. The Stoics want us to view all such external goods as on loan temporarily from Nature. In doing so, we experience both the presence of something and its absence at the same time — we’re anticipating that one day it will be gone. We are to enjoy external things, that is, without attachment to them.

That’s the key to understanding the value of what the Stoics called “preferred indifferents” — health, wealth, reputation, and indeed any external goods. We are to enjoy what is actually present while remembering that it will potentially (indeed inevitably) change or go away. Nothing lasts forever. That’s intended to be a more rational and realistic way of grasping events. However, viewing things in that way tends to lessen emotional dependence upon the objects of our desire. It can therefore also help to moderate the feelings of emotional pain caused when we experience loss or deprivation.

Conclusion

As it happens, Socrates was by far and away the Stoics’ favorite role-model. I discussed his influence on Stoicism in more detail in my book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. Socrates was actually a very good humored and likeable character — not at all a cold fish. Nobody ever accuses him of being unemotional, like a robot, or having a heart of stone. Sometimes it’s helpful to point to the influence of Socrates upon Stoicism, therefore, in order to dispel the myth that Stoicism is about being cold-hearted or poker faced.

We’re told (by Diogenes Laertius) that it was from Socrates that Antisthenes first learned the apatheia which later became synonymous with the Cynic and Stoic way of life — meaning not “apathy” but rather freedom from unhealthy passions, by means of self-mastery. Socrates believed that self-control leads to greater joy and happiness in life. Likewise, for Marcus, who stood in the same tradition, Stoicism was a self-disciplined but cheerful philosophy of life.

What did Marcus Aurelius say about our reasons to be cheerful?

Live your whole life through free from all constraint and with utmost joy in your heart… — Meditations, 7.68

Many people assume that ancient Stoic philosophers such as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius were a grave and joyless lot. However, that’s a misconception. In fact, the Historia Augusta tells us that, despite his “serious and dignified” bearing as emperor, Marcus was “without gloom” and known for his pleasant and genial nature.

We can actually see direct evidence of this as the warmth of his affection for them truly shines forth in the private letters which survive between Marcus and his rhetoric tutor, and family friend, Fronto — such the charming letter Marcus sent Fronto on his birthday, for example. According to the historians, Marcus had a circle of long-standing friends who loved him very dearly, and based on his surviving correspondence that seems easy to imagine.

Marcus himself likewise refers to joy, cheerfulness, love, friendship, and other positive emotions throughout The Meditations, his notebook of personal philosophical reflections. He says, among other things, that he learned how to remain “cheerful when ill, or in the face of any other predicament”, from one of his Stoic mentors (1.5). Applying Stoicism to his own life, he tells himself to be unafraid of death and to meet his fate, not complaining, but “with a truly cheerful mind and grateful to the gods with all your heart” (2.3).

Elsewhere, he says that a good person is one who “loves and welcomes all that happens to him” and preserves the guardian spirit within him throughout life “in cheerful serenity, and following God” (3.16). Moreover, he does so by “living a simple, modest, and cheerful life”, free from anger, and accepting of his fate (3.16). Indeed, once he has grasped the right course of action in life he is to “follow it with a cheerful heart and never a backward glance” (10.12). So based on the evidence, Marcus was perceived as serious but never downcast by others, exhibited warmth and affection to his friends, and, in his private life, valued the cultivation of a cheerful philosophy of life.

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The Story of Demosthenes, Master of Oratory

The Story of Demosthenes, Master of Oratory

In the fourth century BC, a giant was born among Athenian orators. When he spoke, it’s said his words struck listeners like the blazing thunderbolts of Zeus. And his name was… The Anus.

Or rather, as a youth, the other children called him this, Batalus in Greek, because of his speech impediment, as Batalus could also mean “The Stammerer”. His rivals continued to taunt him with that rude nickname for the rest of his life. However, there’s an inspirational story about how he overcame his vocal problems through the most rigorous, focused, and determined training. His real name was Demosthenes, and he was later described by Cicero as the one true master of the whole art of oratory.

Childhood

Demosthenes’ father, who owned a huge workshop manufacturing swords, would be a multi-millionaire by today’s standards. However, both his parents were killed in an accident, when he was aged seven, leaving Demosthenes an orphan. Three legal guardians took control of his vast fortune.

When Demosthenes turned eighteen, and came of age, he discovered they’d stolen his inheritance. He knew he’d have to face them in court and that would require delivering powerful speeches in support of his case. So he began studying rhetoric, the art of speechwriting, and generally using language more effectively.

He devoured the finest speeches of the greatest orators. Whenever he heard someone speak, he’d try to rewrite their words and improve their arguments. However, he was very anxious and unskilled as a speaker. He did stammer, had problems pronouncing the letter r, and his voice was weak and indistinct.

Failures

Demosthenes first tried speaking publicly at the Athenian Assembly, before over six thousand clamouring citizens, a forum anyone could address about political matters. However, it didn’t go well. He spoke awkwardly, using long-winded and complicated arguments, which irritated his audience. His feeble voice dissolved in the hubbub; someone yelled at him to shut up and go home.

Afterwards, he wandered alone by the harbour, hiding his face behind his cloak in shame and despair. However, a friendly old man approached Demosthenes and complimented him, saying that the sophisticated style of his arguments reminded him of the great Athenian statesman Pericles. Nevertheless, he was throwing this talent away because of his poor delivery.

So Demosthenes tried to speak more confidently. Again, though, the Assembly jeered him and he left feeling depressed. This time an actor called Satyrus followed him out and reassured him. Demosthenes complained that despite his best efforts, the crowd were not impressed, and yet they lapped up other speakers who were often coming out with some pretty half-baked ideas.

The actor said, “Pick a speech from one of the classic tragedies and read it to me; I’ll show you a remedy for all your problems.” So he did and then Satyrus took the speech from him and read it back to him, as an actor would, using his facial expression, voice and body language, to convey emotion. In that instant, Demosthenes had an awakening. His speeches started to come alive!

Training

For two long years, he trained himself to improve his delivery. He built an underground chamber. Every single day, for two or three months at a time, he would go down into it and practice. To force himself to focus on his training, he even shaved off one side of his hair so he’d be too embarrassed to go out in public. Instead, he stood in front of a large mirror, patiently reciting entire speeches and studying his own delivery. He started using physical gestures to emphasise certain words, as a way to drive home his ideas and compensate for his weak voice.

He also started using some unusual physical exercises. He trained himself to overcome his speech impediment and improve the clarity of his enunciation by reciting speeches with pebbles in his mouth. He strengthened his voice by reciting long speeches while out of breath, running or walking up steep hills. To practice being heard over the clamour of the Assembly, he’d stand on the beach amidst storms, yelling out speeches over the crashing waves.

He started tailoring the style of his speech to suit different audiences. He kept his language plain and only used a more elegant or formal style very sparingly. He arranged his arguments to make them easier for his audience to understand but not so simple that they appeared patronising. He thought it was important to strike a balance between simplicity and elegance. He used deliberate repetition to emphasise key ideas and stamp them on the memory of his audience. He also varied his vocal speed to make his delivery more interesting and added… suspenseful pauses.

Success

After two years of training, Demosthenes finally sued his guardians. He fought them in court for five years and eventually won his case. Although the court awarded his inheritance back to him, he recovered only a small amount of money as his trustees had already squandered the rest. Nevertheless, through his trials, he had gained something far more valuable: he found his voice as a public speaker and all of Athens knew his name. So he now pursued a glittering career as a legal advocate and speechwriter.

Later, aged about thirty, he started giving very passionate speeches about Athenian politics, arguing that they should form alliances to defend themselves against the threat of Macedonian invasion. When others finished speaking the Athenians would say “How well he spoke!”, but when Demosthenes concluded they cried “Let’s march to battle!” These speeches were so patriotic and inspiring that they catapulted Demosthenes to fame and guaranteed his place among the pantheon of history’s greatest orators.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, Demosthenes’ story proves that even a naturally dismal “anus” of a speaker can rise to stardom with motivation and the right training. Indeed, later in his life, when he had become a teacher of oratory himself, someone asked him what the three most important things are when learning to speak in public. His answer? Practice, practice, practice!

In the fourth century BC, a giant was born among Athenian orators. When he spoke, it’s said his words struck listeners like the blazing thunderbolts of Zeus. And his name was… The Anus.
Or rather, as a youth, the other children called him this, Batalus in Greek, because of his speech impediment, as Batalus could also mean “The Stammerer”.

His rivals continued to taunt him with that rude nickname for the rest of his life. However, there’s an inspirational story about how he overcame his vocal problems through the most rigorous, focused, and determined training. His real name was Demosthenes, and he was later described by Cicero as the one true master of the whole art of oratory.

Read the rest of this article on Medium.

Contemplating love, loss, and mortality

Contemplating love, loss, and mortality

If you are kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being [a mortal] whom you are kissing, for thus when they die, you will not be disturbed. — Epictetus

This is of the most notorious passages in the ancient Stoic literature. It comes from the famous Encheiridion or Handbook (§ 3). Epictetus intended his advice to be taken literally, as basic psychological training for the students of Stoicism he was addressing.

He means that we should silently remind ourselves of the fact, when kissing our loved ones, that they are mortal. Nothing about them is immune to change, and eventually they’re going to die.

Based on his comments elsewhere, incidentally, it seems unlikely that he meant we should expect not to be disturbed at all by the loss of a loved one. Rather he’s advising his students on how to increase their emotional resilience to loss by reducing their sense of attachment, within certain bounds.

We should love in accord with reason, by being brutally honest with ourselves.

In the same passage, he explains that this strategy should be applied in a very general way to anything we love or find pleasurable. We should pause to consider its true nature, avoid adding strong value judgements or emotive language, and just stick to the facts. We should love in accord with reason, by being brutally honest with ourselves. The facts are that the character of our loved ones may change over time, and one day they will be no more.

Kissing as Contemplation

The Stoics believed that most of our problems in life are caused by placing too much value on things that are not entirely up to us, and neglecting to pay attention to our own character and actions. Love that involves self-deception isn’t real love at all. Yet we deceive ourselves when we ignore the uncertainty involved in relationships. We don’t control other people and we can never be certain what the future holds.

Remembering that fact should allow us to experience more healthy gratitude for the present moment, while being prepared in advance for loss. In a sense it’s the key to loving freely, honestly, and without attachment. We can learn to love more wisely by following this Stoic advice and literally telling ourselves that we’re kissing someone who will one day be no more.

…if what we call “love” is a good thing then it shouldn’t be doing us any harm.

Epictetus discusses this in more detail in The Discourses (3.24). He says that the majority of us simply give ourselves more reasons to become upset, “more causes for lamentation”, the more friends we acquire, and the more places with which we fall in love. “Why then,” he asks, “do you live to surround yourself with other sorrows upon sorrows through which you are unhappy?”

Then, I ask you, do you call this love? What love, man!

He says that if authentic love is a good thing then it shouldn’t be doing us any harm. However, if what we call “love” is actually harmful then it’s clearly a bad thing and we should avoid it like the plague. Nature, he claims, intended us to do ourselves good, not evil.

The word for love that he uses here, philostorgia, is often translated as “natural affection” or “familial affection”. It’s the kind of love a parent has for their children. In Stoic theology, it’s the love Zeus has for mankind. Stoicism takes that as paradigmatic of rational love in general — in a sense, it’s the purest form of love. The Stoics aimed to love wisely and virtuously by both wishing that the loved one should become wise and good, while simultaneously accepting that we are all unwise, and fallible. Of course, that’s a paradox. It would require training to learn such an attitude, and maintain it over the course of our lives.

“What is the discipline for this purpose?”, Epictetus asks. How, in other words, can we learn to love wisely? First and foremost, as we’ve seen, he thinks we should learn to love things, and other people, while accepting that they may change, or be lost. He now describes this as the philosophical principle “which stands as it were at the entrance” of rational love. There are in fact many things in life which we appreciate without much attachment, he notes, such as clay pots or drinking glasses.

Epictetus goes on to tell his students here, as in the Encheiridion, that when they kiss their own child, brother or friend, they should remind themselves that one day the loved one will be gone. (In ancient Greece and Rome it was considered normal for friends to kiss on the lips.) The pleasure of experiencing their presence should be enjoyed along with awareness of their potential absence, and never as though we were taking them for granted.

Memento Mori

Epictetus compares this to “those who stand behind men in their triumphs and remind them that they are mortal.” He’s referring to the ancient tradition whereby generals, or emperors, who had been victorious in battle, would ride through the streets of Rome in a triumphal chariot. Captured enemies and treasure would be paraded before them, to the delight of cheering crowds of onlookers. Their faces would be painted red in emulation of the god Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Slaves would stand behind them holding laurel crowns over their heads, while whispering words such as memento mori, or “remember you must die”, in their ears.

Epictetus says that we should, likewise, remind ourselves that those we love, and kiss, are mortal, and do not, ultimately, belong to us. They are ours for the present, he says, but not for all time. Like figs or grapes, which are given to humanity by Nature for part of the year only, when in season, the beloved cannot be ours forever. They are merely on loan to us from Nature.

This imagery sounds very much like an allusion to the mysteries of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, famously celebrated at Eleusis, beside Athens. Whether or not Epictetus had the Eleusinian mysteries in mind, his students would have found it difficult not to make that connection for themselves. The goddess Demeter had a beloved daughter called Persephone. One day she was abducted by the god Hades, who took her to his dark underground kingdom, as his queen. Demeter was distraught at the mysterious disappearance of her daughter, and travelled the earth searching for her in vain.

Eventually, Zeus took pity on her, and arranged for Persephone to return to the world of the living. However, Hades had tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds, for each of which she was fated to spend one month every year living with him in the Underworld. The fruits and grains of the harvest, sacred to Demeter, are provided by her, by Nature, only in due season, for part of the year. Persephone was likewise only with her mother for part of each year, symbolizing the cycles of nature, and the transience of all worldly things, even our loved ones. It’s a myth about coming to terms with loss, and impermanence.

Epictetus, continuing his metaphor, says that anyone who wishes for fresh figs or grapes in winter, is being foolish, by demanding something, which would be contrary to nature and impossible.

So if you wish for your son or friend when it is not allowed to you, you must know that you are wishing for a fig in winter.

Demeter was likewise forced to accept that her beloved daughter, Persephone, would always be absent for half the year. Grieving excessively over this would be as absurd as being upset that figs or grapes do not grow in winter.

When we delight in something or someone, therefore, we should place before our minds, alongside the impression of their presence, the contrary one, of their absence. That’s what it means to perceive things as transient — to experience, in a sense, their presence and absence at the same time. While enjoying the presence of his beloved, the wise man or woman does not forget about, but knowingly anticipates, their absence.

“Tomorrow you will go away or I shall, and never shall we see one another again.”

Epictetus asks what harm there is, while kissing our own child, to whisper to ourselves, in our minds, “Tomorrow you will die”. While kissing their friends, his students likewise are to tell themselves, “Tomorrow you will go away or I shall, and never shall we see one another again.”

He goes on to say that it is a great thing to be able to tell oneself “I begot a son who is mortal.” This is actually a well-known Greek saying, attributed to several wise man. One of them was Xenophon, an Athenian general and one of Socrates’ closest friends, whose dialogues were greatly admired by the Stoics, and elsewhere quoted by Epictetus. The story goes that someone came to Xenophon one say with the shocking news that his son had been killed while on a military campaign. Xenophon merely replied that he knew that his son was mortal. In other words, he’d long been prepared for the possibility that he might receive news of his death.

Epictetus tells his students that they should have thoughts like this always ready to hand, night and day. They must train themselves in them, by writing them down, reading them back, and discussing them with themselves and with others. In the same way, they should learn to say that they knew they were mortal themselves, and that they might lose their home, or be thrown into prison, and so on.

Conclusion

Say to yourself, when you are kissing your wife or child, that they are mortal, and prepare yourself for the fact that they shall die, he says. Tell yourself that you too are mortal, like the slaves whispering memento mori to triumphing emperors and generals. It sounds like shocking advice to many people today. However, even today, many people won’t be shocked by this. They’ll appreciate it as a means of avoiding unhealthy forms of attachment, and viewing relationships more realistically, in way that’s both rational and loving. The Stoics believed that it’s only through such an extraordinary effort to be honest with ourselves that we can achieve the strength to loves others wisely, and in accord with nature.