- All human beings have felt sadness.
This is part of what it means to be a human,
(classical music)
but we don't actually know how to sit and be with suffering.
We numb pain. We try to avoid pain.
We deny that we're in pain.
Stoicism is all about understanding
what's in our control and what's not in our control.
I can't control that an emotion emerges from me,
but I can control how I relate to the emotion itself.
It's the capacity to be with the feeling,
to be with the emotion as it arises
and simply watch it, not fix it.
And if we can learn to be with both ourselves
and with our fellow human beings within their suffering,
I think we can actually learn how to transcend suffering.
My name is Chloe Valdary.
I am the founder of the Theory of Enchantment
an anti-racism organization based in New York City.
Socialism emerged after Alexander the Great died.
Alexander the Great had just conquered the known world.
His territories were being carved up
among his four generals,
and this was causing a great deal of chaos
and a sense of existential despair among the people
who were impacted by this conquering.
Imagine that you are a citizen in Ancient Greece
and in the past, you knew your neighbors,
you spoke the same language,
you were very rooted in your environment,
but all of that has become upended,
and you are now experiencing
an incredible amount of homelessness.
Not only physical homelessness,
but existential homelessness.
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Stoicism was kind of invented
as a way to deal with that feeling.
This is why I think it's immediately relevant
in our context today because there's all kinds of ways
in which we can encounter existential homelessness
where we don't feel at home where we are.
So stoicism is all about getting us in right relationship
with the things that we can control and we can't control.
- The outlook is bleak.
People could not control that Alexander the Great died,
but they can control their response to the event itself.
And in that same vein, I can control, and you can control,
how you respond to the events that arise in your own life.
Sympatheia is a Greek term.
It's a stoic principle.
And it essentially means a capacity
to see everything as interrelated.
So this capacity to zoom out of your own lived experience,
it enables you to see how connected you are
to other human beings and to what's going on around you.
This is very useful,
let's say if I'm feeling really sad --
instead of simply feeling sad, I can zoom out
and think to myself, oh, what's it like to feel sadness?
Instead of being in the emotion, I can be with the emotion.
I can then say I'm not the only person
that has felt sadness, right?
And so even in that very difficult feeling,
I can feel connected to my fellow human
and I can experience meaning,
even though it's a very difficult feeling to feel.
And this is related
to one of our most sacred pop culture relics.
"The Lion King".
In "The Lion King" Mufasa tells his son Simba
about the circle of life.
This is a very stoic scene where Mufasa says to his son,
"The circle of life, it's a thing."
- [Mufasa] "Everything you see exists together
in a delicate balance."
- And then Simba says, "what do you mean?
We're not the antelopes."
[Simba] "Dad, don't we eat the antelope?
And Mufasa says,
[Mufasa] "Yes, Simba, but let me explain.
When we die, our bodies become the grass,
and the antelope eats the grass.
And so we are all connected in the great circle of life."
This is the kind of move that can help us
get out of existential despair even.
I will add, however, as a caution,
we want to zoom out and zoom in at the same time.
There is a situation where you keep zooming out
and you just see the vastness of space,
and that can actually bring you into despair as well.
So you want to do the move where you zoom out
but you also zoom in simultaneously,
and those two things can help inform each other
and can help balance each other out.
(waves crashing)
My stoic practices are very context specific.
So let's just take sympatheia for example.
There will be times where I am feeling sad and melancholic.
I will, depending upon the situation,
simply be with the sadness
as a way to let sadness teach me something
that's the sort of move where I'm going into the emotion,
and that could simply look like me journaling
about my sadness or me crying.
Crying is excellent.
I might want to write poetry.
In my case, I will write music about it.
I will emote in that way and letting myself move through it
as opposed to trying to change it.
(soft piano music)
After I do that, I can zoom out and think to myself,
"oh, this is a feeling that many people
across time and space have felt
and this connects me with the rest of humanity."
(soft piano music)
Compassion is about that.
It's about learning how to be with both ourselves
and our fellow human in their suffering.
And it is that capacity to be able to read people
that can only come from being able to read yourself.
It can only come from developing that centeredness
within your own being that can enable you
to see that within the other.
If we can learn how to get a right relationship with that,
we will be less likely to project our insecurities
and the things that we don't like about ourselves
onto other people.
And we'll be less likely in that context,
to see things that are new,
that are part of the unknown as threats
and we'll be more likely to see them as sources of wonder.
(soft piano music)