A Reflection of Reading Classical Philosophy

In fear of sounding cliché, the day you find out that you’re going to be a parent is a big one. For me, it became a question of how I was going to be a good father. It seemed to be the most important thing in the world to me.

There’s a new life that is going to be solely dependent on you and your partner.

It’s big.

My wife wanted me to read about parenting. I started with a few books that seemed to be some retread of the types of things you read when you get your teaching license, with titles like Best Parenting Practices or Evidence Based Parenting. None of it really seemed to be adding much to my perception of what being a good father was.

I needed something more.

I had read Marcus Aurelius before, but I never read Meditations through the lens of actually wanting to improve myself. I read it because I understood it was a book you should read. I got reminded of him through Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic videos on YouTube. So I went back and looked into Meditations again, but this time with a purpose.

You see, you won’t get better if you don’t have a reason. And at that moment, I had a reason, and my reason was outside of me, reminding me of the quote from Lao Tzu, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Meditations made a great impact. It changed how I perceive my career and practices that I utilize. I annotated the shit out of my copy. But as I did so, I made note of the references he made. These are a lot of the same references that Holiday makes as well.

This took me down the Stoic rabbit hole: Epictetus, Seneca, Musonius Rufus. I did the same thing with them, leading me to the depth of Western Philosophy… Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus. I wanted to know what these guys said, whether I agreed with them or not. I wanted to know the context of criticisms. I wanted to see what they said that put them in their place of esteem, and their places of critique.

Down the rabbit hole I went. Like Alice on her own odyssey, so I began my internal journey. In it, I found something that would revolutionize my life and the way I went about my job.

When you read broadly enough, and you read the best of what societies put forward, patterns emerge. There’s not a lot of truths in the world that we are able to come to agreements on separately, but there are some.

Maybe there is a thing about patience, discipline, self-reliance.

But this is not the world that’s promoted. Instead, it’s self-love. It’s making sure you feel good all of the time. It’s safe-spaces and everyone gets a medal. It’s that everyone needs to be praised and validated, even if you don’t do anything at all.

I fell into this trap for a long time. Self-esteem is great, but not when it’s charity. Self-esteem is earned. It comes with the sense that you can do difficult things. Self-esteem doesn’t happen because everything is nice. You get it by doing. Unearned self-confidence will quickly crumble. Epictetus said “a building on a rotten foundation will soon crumble”. And a person with an unearned sense of self-esteem will fold when met with something harder than themselves.

In writing this, this makes me think that this is the explanation as to why sports are so popular in the US. It’s the last bastion of the common difficulties. It’s a shared struggle we can all go through. Sports are hard. They are physically demanding, psychologically challenging, and require your absolute attention to be any good at them. Most people are not hunting their food nor tilling a field. Most people live at 72 degrees. So we get to watch a meritocracy unfold in front of us whenever we watch sports.

But, I digress.

We live in a world that’s so rare in having meaningful conversation. Most things are shallow, immediate, self-serving. People are quick to backstab, and talk ill of one another. I get it. Most people don’t have time for a three hour conversation, and people want to talk about the things right in front of them.

I see this pulling of two different sides of me. One side is the modern side that is trapped by Instagram, YouTube, ESPN, Kendrick & Drake. It’s a more degenerate side of me, a more mean-spirited self. It’s impatient, it’s undisciplined, it’s slothful. It’s loud. To be honest, it’s also the funnier side, as far as sarcasm is concerned.

But then there’s the other side. The side that relishes the slow. And instead of slothful, it’s the idea that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.It’s disciplined, kind-hearted, controlled, calculating. It’s the “Monk Mode” of the self. It’s stoic in its approach to things outside of myself. It’s uncaptured, but interested in the whys and the spirit of life.

Philosophy, and generally old books — doesn’t matter the culture — have created the lane for this part of my soul to gain strength. It’s much louder than it used to be. You might consider it the angel on the shoulder. At one point in life, it was all but silent. A whisper of what it is now.

The child mind, the impatient one, the one that lives in distractions, has been muted. It no longer commands my actions.

I suppose there’s a number of ways to gain this distancing from the child mind, but it’s never going to be easy. It takes work. It could be a disciplined physical practice, engaging in meaningful conversations with the right audience. This is not to say an echo chamber, but rather challenging intellectual discussion of important topics, in a constructive, well-meaning manner. Good faith debates, as it were.

Seneca, a Roman philosopher, said “read well-tried authors”. You could take it as you should read things that carry universal wisdom, and have been proven so. Just because it’s old and difficult, doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer people living now.

The great philosophers and various religious texts have given me a sense of meaning and direction that I had not found. It fed my spirit. Plato’s Republic, the Bhagavad Gita, The Tao, Seneca, Epictetus, Nicomachean Ethics, The list goes on. They make you question your morality, and I mean really question it.

I found myself walking away from a dish I put in an easy place, not the right place, stepping away, and then questioning that decision. I asked myself, “was that the right thing to do?” I immediately went back and corrected my mistake.

This is a small action, but small actions build. Once you accumulate enough small actions, the avalanche of positive growth truly begins. But as Miyamoto Musashi said, “the journey is inward”.