Look Behind You! —Stoic Prayer
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I am Looking at My Journey”
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
Stoicism is the Western answer to the contemplative traditions of the East.
There are few stoic phrases that encapsulate the project of Stoicism better than ‘Amor Fati’ and ‘Memento Mori’. If you translate them directly they mean “To Love One’s Fate” and “Look Behind You” or “Remember You Will Die”, respectively.
A Stoic, today, is someone who focuses on being calm and not letting things they cannot control upset them while working on being a good person. If you ask a stoic what the first of those two phrases mean, they will say something like finding equanimity and a sense of peace in having to accept the circumstances of your life that happened, are happening now and are arriving. The second they will tell you is that no matter how tall you stand today, how great you think you are, how much good fortune you are enjoying, remember where you came from, and therefore that you are mortal and that you will die one day.
Cheerful stuff.
THE EXAMINED LIFE
Today, there is another way you are invited to sit with these ideas. For this, we go back to the work of arguably the most iconic Greek philosopher, Socrates, who said:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
The problem is you never got told exactly what to examine, or how. And here you are again, feeling the same feelings, stuck in the same patterns and wondering what you did wrong.
It helps to think of your life in packets. There was the packet you spent in the womb. There was the packet of your infancy, then the toddler packet, and so on. In a way, this last cycle you have been through was a packet. And if you are open to the idea of renewal, it means you will be getting ready to pick yourself up and face a new cycle, a new packet. To live an examined life then, implies that you have to look back, and examine the packets of your life. How far back, is up to you. Your heart will tell you what magnitude of death and rebirth you are facing right now.
Once or twice in your life, when you apply this practice, you will be looking at whole pieces. Like a courtship and marriage after a divorce, like a job after resigning. Sometimes it will just be a year.
This is the playlist I use for this kind of work:
You’ll need a pen and notebook for this. I suggest using the same journal every time. You ask yourself how far back you are looking, let us say a month, and then you write down all your accomplishments and all the things that defined the investments of your energy and attention you can call your Choices, the good, the bad—warts and all.
PRACTICE MAKES PROGRESS
There is a powerful question you can yourself. It begins like this:
“If I could have my time again…”
In your journal, create three columns, KEEP, STOP and START.
Under the KEEP column, jot down the practices and habits you chose for yourself that feel serve you, and ways you are proud of and want to keep being like.
Under the STOP column, note the choices you made that you know aren’t serving you, habits and patterns you would like to disintegrate. Remember all negative habits are part of a pattern of feelings and responses.
Under the START column, include a few things that you want to introduce to your next packet or cycle of life.
Don’t dish up too much on your plate, that you cannot actually chew through and digest.
And below make some space for Celebrations and Griefs. If you do not take time to honour the wins that you did have, the things that came to fruition that you put energy and attention into you are overlooking what also needs to be examined and witnessed in your life. Similarly, with Grief, you need to honour the one in you that walked the road of your life and did not have their dreams requited. To be whole you have to grieve. Every packet, every cycle, there will be something real to grieve. If you have nothing real to grieve, grieve that you have nothing real to grieve, because it means simply that you have not lived.
There is no real constructive point to being a hard critic, a silent martyr or a complainer. There is no real chance of progressing in life and pursuing meaning if you keep living the same patterns over and over again. Regret is the inevitable result of risking yourself. Mistakes are a sure sign that you are learning. And both are signs of growth.
If you want to move forward you have to plan forward. If you want what you have never had, you must do what you have never done. You need to look back to see forward more clearly.
This is how we practice an examined life. We look backwards.
This is what it means to ‘Look Behind You’, to “Love your Fate’. This is self-awareness and self-acceptance, true and simple.
The trick is to be objective, be a good parent, a good leader, and a true friend to yourself when you do this practice. Idealism is bullshit.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Soren Kierkegaard
Just be like this today. Today I am taking a moment between moments, to examine my life, to look back and ask myself, “If I had my time again, knowing what I know now, how would I choose to live it?”
Today I am resting in the moment between moments, to cradle my griefs, so that I can let them find rest.
If you would like some guidance around how to practice Looking Back over a troubling arc of your life, reach out.
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