[Stoic Meditation] What is in Keeping with your Character?

“Character is a powerful defense in a world that would love to be able to seduce you, buy you, tempt you, and change you. If you know what you believe and why you believe it, you’ll avoid poisonous relationships, toxic jobs, fair-weather friends and any number of ills that afflict people who haven’t thought through their deepest concerns. That’s your education. That’s why you do this work.”

What is in Keeping with your Character?, The Daily Stoic, April 30th

 

We are as dynamic as the Earth we're living in

Ah! That ever-present problem of NOT knowing oneself. I think this is a rather common problem that causes a lot of strain in one’s life. Although this is the case, I don’t believe that we can 100% know ourselves. We change as quickly as the weather, sometimes as erratic as the frequency of the waves in the ocean. We can only be certain about ourselves at a specific moment, a given time, but almost never all the time. We are all beings of contradictions and our actions, especially the ones acted upon moments of high emotions, are barely unexplainable. As quoted from the book, The Idiot, of my fave writer and philosopher, F. Dostoyevsky, 

“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”

Despite this, I think it is essential to have something in our lives that we firmly believe in. Whether it is our beliefs when it comes to morality or our perceived notion of social protocols, it is important to have something solid that can help us navigate our day to day living. As for myself lately, mine focuses on two things: (1) that I will move on this earth without purposely adding to the misery of someone, and, (2) that I will try to live my life as fully as possible. I think, just with these two seemingly “Quality Assurance” questions, I am able to live a guilt-free sort-of life. 

I believe that in order for us to live a life that we will not regret of, we have to know what is important for us and what we truly believe in.

This is a rather short blog entry but I hope it will do for now as I am working on something else at the moment.