Admittedly, it did take a certain amount of stoicism to weather what she had just been through. Sometimes it is necessary to turn inward to keep your head held high-to rely on yourself and nobody else. Sometimes, life throws you a curve and Stoicism is your own choice. But did you know? the basic idea of Stoicism is: don’t freak out about what you can’t control. Apparently if you do stoicism right, you can thrive.

Silly me. I thought the basic idea of stoicism was to act like nothing is bothering me. To be strong and do everything on my own. To not let anyone know I have feelings. To keep a marble-like unruffled face. In other words: Frozen.

Don’t let them in, don’t let them see, Be the good girl you always have to be. Conceal, don’t feel; don’t let them know….

But no! Stoicism is much more and so much better than that – and – it’s something you can do alone very well – and thrive. Thankfully, in my isolation, I stumbled on a great article from Raptitude where David Cain referenced Elif Batuman who in turn recommended three major Stoic works, classics by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (Epictetus, Aurelius – let them roll off your tongue, add a little rhythm and I feel some new song lyrics coming on….) Hopefully, we will not have quarantine time enough to read these three volumes. So here you go in a nutshell:

• don’t freak out about what you can’t control
• divide your moment-to-moment concerns into two bins: the things you can control, and the things you can’t.
• The first bin is small and it’s the only one for which you are responsible
• The second bin is the responsibility of the gods – let it go!

From Raptitude: You can feel free to leave the gods’ enormous bin entirely up to them, as long as you do your best to tend to your small bin of personal choices and habits. Of course, the larger bin still affects your life, even though you can’t (and shouldn’t try to) curate it. It contains matters such as when and how you die, how others act, the weather, and the stock market… Obviously we have a stake in how those matters turn out, yet these outcomes aren’t really up to us, and we shouldn’t make ourselves miserable wishing they were. You will be treated unfairly, you will get sick, you will lose everything, and you will die, and the gods (or whatever forces there are) will deliver those fates to you as they please.

The gods may throw a dice
Their minds as cold as ice
And someone way down here
Loses someone dear…

But don’t just read the quote above, click on over to Raptitude and look at the two diagrams. Don’t you feel much, much better now with a manageable sized burden?