Stoical
Stoicism gets a bad rap. Calling someone a stoic, or stoical, conjures images of an insensitive, unempathetic grouch who grumblingly dismisses others’ emotions and denies their own. A curmudgeon, a narcissist even.
I dwelt upon this image because my immediate family bifurcates along clear lines when unpleasant or unhappy issues arise, and I wondered how this gaping crevasse could occur within one gene pool. I am reminded of a story an International Relations professor shared at Middlebury to help us understand the nuanced difficulties of diplomacy: two people stand on opposite sides of a barn, arguing heatedly about its color. One observer fervently claims that it is red, the other that it is as white as the driven snow. Of course, both are right because the farmer had some fun with decorating (or neglected it entirely) and painted each side a different hue. The arguers needed only to walk around to their opponent’s side of the structure to see it from the other’s perspective.
My investigations were my attempt to do just that. My younger son and I are more emotional; easily set off; highly reactive. This trait can express itself in endearing demonstrations of empathy, but it can also provoke scorching lava. My older son and his dad are steadier emotionally. They watch and wait, analyze logically (Spock, anyone?), and simmer rather than boil over. This predilection can manifest as wisdom and patience, or flatlined, disconnected apathy. And for someone with a more volatile emotional nature, the latter camp frustrates me at times. So I decided to take a walk to the other side of the symbolic outbuilding by first, talking with my older son, and then researching the origins of this personality style.
The OED defines stoicism as the “endurance of pain or hardship without the display of feelings and without complaint.” Note, even that definition does not necessarily negate the existence of the feelings or desire to kvetch. It just points out that stoics just don’t wear their reactions on their proverbial sleeves. I find that difficult to relate to as anyone who knows me knows that my face is a free-for-all of reactions.
That same reference behemoth, though, also explains that Stoicism is an ancient Greek school of philosophy founded by Zeno in the third century BC, in which “virtue, the highest good, is based on knowledge; the wise live in harmony with the diving Reason that governs nature, and are indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune and to pleasure and pain.” The name derives from the porch (stoa) of the Agora in Athens (which I’ve visited) where the philosophers would hold forth. Emotions like fear and envy, they said, arose from “false judgements,” and that sages who had “attained moral and intellectual perfection” would not be subject to such sentimental vagaries. Centuries later, Seneca, a Roman follower of this school of thought, walked as he taught his students. He found this a meditative way to clear his mind and convey his teachings. “The sage,” he said, “is utterly immune to misfortune and virtue is sufficient for happiness.”
This interpretation of the lack of emotional response enabled me to see the red barn as white. It reminded me of Buddhism: enlightened beings (bodhisattvas) have broken the eternal cycle of suffering by detaching from the pain. Pain, they would claim, is an inevitable part of life. Suffering is not. Mindful nonattachment to the source of the pain and acknowledgement of its impermanence frees us from suffering. I looked further into these parallels and was both delighted and dismayed to find the ether full of comparisons of the two philosophies. Delighted because they confirmed my instinct; dismayed because they disabused me of any notion that I had had an original, insightful thought.
Of course, I could have simply looked to Shakespeare for an explanation of the quandary: “for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” Hamlet tells his school “friends” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Hamlet, II.ii.250-1). I previously thought both Brutus and Macbeth rather heartless. Mid-mayhem, attendants tell them both that their wives have died. Brutus, wise and with other things to worry about, replies, “We must die… with meditating that she must die once, I have the patience to endure it now.” (Julius Caesar, IV.iii.189-92). Macbeth, perhaps less wise but with just as much to worry about, says of Lady M: “She should have died hereafter: There would have been a time for such a word.” (Macbeth, V.v.17-18) Whereas before I viewed both of these very different characters as somewhat insensitive, I now see that stronger reactions would not have served them.
This brings me back to my side of the barn. Surely there are situations that warrant demonstrative emotion. And just as surely there are situations where a complete lack of emotion is more maladaptive than wise. But I have checked my own misperceptions about stoics and find them too harsh. My older son once explained to me that it is simply a waste of time and energy to allow someone else’s actions – especially less significant ones, like noisy theatregoers or poor drivers, which tend to rile me – hijack even a moment of your day. We are all complex products of our DNA and life experience. I kid myself not that I will suddenly become floating-on-a-cloud Buddha-like. But this mini-education about an approach to life’s fluctuations that I’d previously thought of as insensitive has given me pause – hopefully pause enough to rein in my knee jerk reactions occasionally.