Stoic Journal: Looking Back at the Year...

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It's been a while since I last wrote anything here, and as we approach the end of this (admittedly incomplete) first year of Stoic journalling, perhaps it is not premature to look back and consider an important omission in my method... or is it an advantage?

As a teenager in both the Lower and Upper Sixth Form (in England), which is now over forty years ago (and might elsewhere be referred to as ‘high school’, I suppose), I used to write tons of emotional, misinformed screed under the guise of 'creative writing', as we were expected to write things like poetry (alas, now all lost) and prose (likewise) in an exercise book issued specifically for the purpose. Nowadays, what I used to write would surely be categorised as the kind of pointless, ineffective emotional offloading mentioned in relation to the odd, blue-haired female in a previous article, and indeed, such 'writing' is what often passes for a 'journal' these days. Looking back at that writing now (or what I am able to remember of it), it becomes painfully apparent that I was never going to create a best-seller that way: disorganised, emotional, essentially responding irrationally to whatever idiocy was in the latest news or resulting from misinformation from a variety of historical sources. I lacked both direction and discipline.

Fast forward to today, and from the foregoing articles, the reader might ask: "A period of reflection twice a day - once in the morning and once in the evening - is that an easy thing to do? Are you always able to write?" ... well, the short (and truthful) answer is "no". Quite apart from being busy with prep work for the day's lessons (of which there may be many) or perhaps having to get my main boxen running again late at night when something goes wrong, alongside a whole host of other diurnal annoyances and distractions, the fact is that it is not always possible to respond to the daily prompt; very often, I find that I have nothing to say, no reasonable comments to make. Therefore, very often, I simply write: "None".

The reasonable reader might then ask how it should be that I cannot respond, but we have to remember that questions of a philosophical type may be difficult to answer, simply because they may require experience or knowledge which one has not yet encountered, even at my age. Which, then, is better: to write an answer which may not be correct, or to just write "None", and wait until the question swings around again the following year? I have chosen the latter approach, on the premise that it would be better to avoid recording an irrelevant or inappropriate response and instead, to be patient and wait for an opportunity to record something more sensible. In my younger days, this was the kind of discipline and discernment that I lacked. I would like to avoid the trap of speaking too much and saying too little; especially, to avoid the kinds of ill-considered and primarily emotional reactions which would lead to me accidentally gaslighting myself in the future!

This idea is illuminated by a number of past happenings and experiences. For example, during my periods spent instructing would-be TESOL teachers, one very important (and insufficiently discussed) point, which we examined earlier, was the way in which the learner's mind slowly constructs a practical world-view based upon a variety of inputs from their daily lives; they are said to slowly build up a 'schema' in which experiences are fitted together or linked according to relevance or usefulness, which then allows individuals to function better in the world as they acquire a more fluent understanding of how things work - essentially, their previous experience allows them to do things more efficiently (or, perhaps, to avoid killing themselves by not doing something dumb). As time passes, individuals build up a range of 'schemata' by means of which they navigate their daily lives. As some schemata could be quite extensive, we would expect an individual to make many cross-connections (representing factors common to two or more lesser schemata) which would allow them to discover new ideas. It might be asserted that the process of teaching is the enabling of schemata connections in students.

However, as I have found from my own experience, it is by no means impossible for information to be interpreted incorrectly, or worse, deliberately introduced to the individual with the express purpose of misleading or misinforming them. The media (and not a few individuals) are full of bogus pseudo-information which is constantly being broadcast to gaslight the wider population into certain patterns of thinking or behaviour. This is diametrically opposed to the notion of a sovereign, independent citizen and has to be countered with close attention and constant fact-checking of one's own. As wider society also tends to be riddled with an oversupply of hypocrisy, perhaps we can avoid reflecting that in our own work by not gracing it with a response. So many philosophers of the past were quite insistent that knowledge represented power, but they meant the empowerment of the sovereign individual, not the egregious state and its dubious minions.

From this, I have concluded that a 'no' response (to the daily prompt) is better than recording a (possibly incorrect and misled) answer resulting from ignorance of a topic, or having been presented with incorrect information about it. When the same prompt swings around again next time, maybe I will have more appropriate ideas or responses; maybe I will have had more relevant experiences in the interim.

In any case, it seems to me that no response is better than recording one which results from ignorance or public manipulation. It might follow from this that a particularly difficult prompt question might take years to answer, but either the acquisition of future knowledge or experience might suddenly give us an angle that we never had before; cast a shaft of light into a place where we formerly felt that a response was impossible. If the question is important, I would submit that that answer is well worth waiting for, like a fine wine which takes years to mature. The new knowledge, the new insight is surely worth the forbearance.

It is interesting that in a wider historical context, philosophers of the past are often considered hypocritical by some people. Seneca, for example, seems to have amassed some considerable wealth in his lifetime, which seemed at odds with the kind of frugal advice that he tended to dish out, and also was the paid tutor of the emperor Nero; but in the end, neither his wealth nor his philosophy saved him from execution. He does seem to have been consoled somewhat by it as the inevitable approached, however. We might reflect instead upon the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, whose own writings were really admonitions to himself regarding how he should perform his own role as Emperor, as it was a role into which he was fitted by the decisions of others rather than by genuine birthright. We might characterise his advice to himself as "in every situation, think before you put foot in mouth".

If the essence of wisdom is partly constituted in patience and observation before launching into a response, however, both Seneca and Marcus have something to offer us, although they seem to come at it from different directions. For Seneca, at least in part, there was some realisation that although a comfortable life could result from the wealth that he had accumulated, the comfort alone was not sufficient; at best, it merely made some aspects of his life easier, but all the wealth in the world cannot prevent a man from dying (and it certainly did not, in his own particular case). He understood, and promulgated, the idea that desire without action would lead to an unsatisfactory (and unsatisfying) life, with little visible achievement to look back on at the end of it all. Marcus, on the other hand, could be said to have had greatness thrust upon him, and had to figure out how to use it in a position from which great damage might result from a poor decision (as he was the actual Roman Emperor), and in which so many had been (and would be) assassinated. Neither man was immune to a violent end, although Marcus's responsibilities stretched farther, but both were, to a greater or lesser extent, bound by the political situation of their times and, I suggest, understood how important it was to think carefully before each utterance. Contrast this with today's situation, where the blessing of free speech is so often abused en passant. Unlike the idiot of today, both Seneca and Marcus understood Socrates' dictum about "the unexamined life". They were also reminded daily that death was inevitable (Memento mori: “Remember that you must die”).

We might ask, then, what happens when the time swings around again and I look back at the vacant entry for that morning or evening, finding only the word: "None"? I did not record a response and looking at it, I probably will not remember why. However, this presents me with an opportunity to either respond according to experience or knowledge which has come to me in the intervening period, or again to not respond. The choice is available to make an entry if I feel that I have something to record, or to avoid it if I think, in the moment, that there is no new experience or information worthy of note. This has the strange side-effect of ensuring that, until a later time, there may still be questions pending answers; potentially, still something fresh to discover.

Therefore, it seems to me nowadays that my teenage experience of writing pointless screed for hours on end suggests that my time might be better spent; that spaces in the text mean that there are still experiences to be had, and discoveries to be made as I connect my various schemata, when previous knowledge and experience is suddenly illuminated by something new. This shows that learning was not something that ended when my formal education ceased; that a mind still open to new information and experience remains important, and that even at my current advanced age, there is still room to grow.

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