On not living in Dread

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm going my best not to focus on the bad number from my recent blood work. I'm fond of saying that "I refuse to live in Dread. It's a bad place and I won't live there."

The following is a quotation from a wonderful book I'm reading, Travels with Epicurus, by Daniel Klein:

ON RAGE AND STOICISM

"God knows, I can all too easily get into raging against the dying of the light. The entire prospect of gradually and inevitably falling apart, with death as the only possible relief, not only fills me with terror; it overwhelms me with anger. Not fair, any of it. 'This is the final payoff for having lived a long and fruitful life? Who made the rules? I hate it, all of it.

But what can come of my rage? Even if it feels authentic to cry foul in face of this ultimate cosmic joke, is howling with fury the way I want to spend the period of my life before old old age gets me? The Stoics, both Greek and Roman, would certainly argue against taking the rage route.

Stoicism, founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium, not long before Epicurus took up residence there, developed over the course of more than three centuries, reaching into all regions of Greece and to Rome, where such philosophers as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius refined and elaborated upon its fundamental tenets. This philosophy's most abiding idea is that people should liberate themselves from their passions and surrender uncomplainingly to what is unavoidable, because dwelling on what is out of our control invites pain without any conceivable gain.

Zeno out-Zenned Epicurus in his prescription for a calm and comforting happiness; he advocated fully detaching ourselves from our desires rather than, as Epicurus proposed, calibrating and mapping out various routes to contentment. Epictetus, a first-century Greek, succinctly expressed the results of practicing Stoic philosophy: "Show me one who is sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy. Show him me. By the gods I Would fain see a Stoic."

The Stoics, then, would advise us to cut loose at the very source of our rage against the horrors of old old age by becoming indifferent to old old age's claim on us. After all, it is out of our control anyhow. With no expectations or desires, we will experience no geriatric depression.

I do not think I am able to do that. Sometimes the practice of Stoicism feels more like denying pain than transcending it, and denial of any kind has rarely seemed to me like an authentic way to live. ('Mere are also times when the practice of Stoicism seems like a mind game, one that comes perilously close to singing to oneself "Don't Worry, Be Happy.") But one compelling idea that I do take away from Stoic philosophy is the business about letting go of matters over which I have no control. Focusing on the horrors of old old age before I get there would get me nowhere. For starters, it would be a waste of precious and very limited time."

Here's hoping we can all avoid wasting our precious and limited time living in Dread.