Practice like a Stoic: 7, Take a very broad perspective
Let's look at things from way above...
[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics—How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic. Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 55-57 of the paperback edition.]
"The agitations that beset you are superfluous, and depend wholly upon judgments of your own. You can get rid of them, and in so doing will indeed live at large, by embracing the whole universe in your view and comprehending all eternity and imagining the swiftness of change in each particular, seeing how brief is the passage from birth to dissolution, birth with its unfathomable before, dissolution with its infinite hereafter.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.32)
Marcus Aurelius had bigger fish to fry than Isabella did. Much bigger. He had to deal with two frontier wars, against the Parthians on the east and the Marcomanni and other German tribes on the north; he had to face the worst plague to strike the ancient world, possibly causing as many as five million deaths; and he had to put down a rebellion initiated by one of his trusted governors. All the while, he was of fragile health and had no previous experience as a military commander. No wonder he so often resorted to what modern Stoics refer to as the “view from above” meditation in order to put his troubles into a broader, cosmic perspective.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that contemplating the vast expanse of time and space will simply solve your problems. At the end of the day, Marcus still had to wage war and take concrete actions against the plague and his governor. Stoicism does not magically make these problems disappear—but it does invite you to think about them in a different, hopefully more helpful way.
When Marcus tells himself in his Meditations that the agitations of his mind are superfluous, he is saying that nurturing one’s anger at an injustice is not going to redress the injustice itself, and moreover that these agitations will keep you miserable for days, weeks, or months. Your misery is self-inflicted and doesn’t help you remedy the initial offense. In this sense, it is completely under your control whether to keep harping on what was done to you, or to stop and shift your attention toward something more constructive.
Marcus takes us one step further and teaches us how to halt an unproductive train of thought: He compares his admittedly big problems (millions of lives at stake) with the grand expanse of time and space. This reminds him that no matter what he thought was so important, it will soon be forgotten and will become but a footnote in history. Again, the idea is not to cultivate callousness—the war still needs to be waged. Rather, we should calm down about it! This equanimity will allow us to better tackle whatever problem we face.
If considering your problems in the context of the entirety of the universe is too broad a perspective, try one of the following variations. The first is to consider the problems that feel most significant to you in comparison to another (much more serious) class of situations, putting your own into perspective. Take the sort of issues that people like Marcus had to deal with regularly. The second variation—again in order to gain a healthful perspective—is to remind yourself that your experiences are not unique. You decide which version of the view from above is most useful to you. Just remember that keeping things in perspective is both emotionally helpful and practically beneficial.
I’ve always liked this strategy ever since I learned about it whether it’s thinking of all the people that have existed through time, all the people that exist now, or even just comparing my troubles to the greater suffering of those around the world (although sometimes I worry that comparing myself to other people as my strategy isn’t always the best).
Personally I’m not as sure that contemplating the vastness of the universe helps since I don’t necessarily think our smallness makes us any less valuable, but thinking of my smallness in terms of the number of people who exist, have existed, or will exist works well since my life is no more valuable than any of theirs.