I am a broken person. For myriad and manifold reasons, really, but today we’re talking about my back. A few years prior, I, being the loving brother that I am, picked up my sister and her husband from SFO. I dropped them off at their place, popped my trunk, and shoveled out my sister’s substantial suitcase, lifting from my back in a ripping, tearing motion. It felt weird on the drive home, more weird when I woke up with a sleeping foot, and weirder still when I realized that the pins and needles had not dissipated, even hours into my day. I had herniated a disk in my back, between my L4 and L5. It sucked. And it sucked for a few months of my life where I could do little beyond physical therapy – a profoundly frustrating experience for me. My identity has always been wrapped up in activities – martial arts specifically. Now I was injured and I couldn’t do my thing; I couldn’t be me. Worse, I was injured and it wasn’t even doing my thing - I hadn’t done hurt my back doing hardcore sparring at Krav Maga or bending myself like a pretzel at capoeira. Rather, I had been doing something simple, stupid[1].
I recovered, but the event prompted some major self-reflection and life changes. I did a lot of reading and thinking while I was battling back from my injury[2]. It was a well-traveled path for me: Thanks to a Jesuit education in the liberal arts, reading in philosophy and spirituality has become my go-to strategy for dealing with adversity. Once after a break-up, I alternated drinking Guinness and reading Aristotle. In times of troubles or tribulations, I turn to my library to seek the consolations of Lady Philosophy.
So, returning to where we began: I am broken. This time I injured my back after an over-enthusiastic round of sparring with a friend[3]. I have been out of commission for the past month. That’s about long enough to get me down, so I looked to my shelves and found something I thought would prove relevant: Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.
I came to Seneca late. He eluded my notice in my philosophy studies. Despite my love of Ancient Philosophy and Stoicism in particular, I had always found it hard to get into Roman Stoics like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. But last year, following some emotional (rather than physical) trauma, I picked up “On the Shortness of Life”, three short essays of Seneca’s. It was an articulate, uplifting explanation of the value of philosophy – useful for someone like me who still finds myself defending my philosophy degree many years into my actual career. Seneca’s message was essentially what I am telling you here: Life is hard and short. You can make your time easier and fuller by studying philosophy.
Stoic philosophy is almost like a Nas song: Life’s a bitch and then you die. Ancients understood this well, living in a time where famine, plague, and war were the natural state of being. Fate could be insanely cruel. Hell, fate is still insanely cruel. Life really is a bitch – it will break everyone. You will fail and falter. There will be times where it seems there is more pain than you can bear. The person you love and depend on the most will not be there when you need them. You will get sick and hurt. You won’t have the money for everything you need. Life is suffering.
Stoicism is the philosophy of the broken. It tells you that, though you cannot control everything that happens to you, you can control your reactions to everything that happens to you. We have the capacity to understand our nature and control our reactions. With our reason, we can understand the Terms and Conditions of the world we inherited. We can understand ourselves, our world, and how things work. We can come to understand that old age, illness, and mortality are what is in store for everyone. And we can begin to prepare ourselves for the worst.
One of my favorite practices in Stoicism is the “Premeditation of Evils” – basically, imagining all the bad things that can happen to you, and how you can react to them. This is something we do in our Krav Maga training; we put ourselves in bad situations and try to think about how we would deal with them before we need to IRL. The Premeditation of Evils is the same, but for spiritual pain. It is thinking about what burying your children might be like before you actually need to. It is imagining what life would be like if you were exiled and destitute. It is understanding that your lover will someday look at you with hateful, or worse, empty eyes. Essentially, it is the psychological equivalent of the Boy Scout Motto – Be Prepared. You know these bad things can happen to people. You know you are a person. Be prepared.
That also means understanding and accepting mortality – yours included. Many letters focus on the inevitability of death and accepting this with grace. “No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out… You will go the way that all things go. What is strange about that? This is the law to which you were born; it is the lot of your father, your mother, you ancestors and of all who came before you as it will be of all who come after you… Think of the multitudes of people doomed to die that will be following you, that will be keeping you company!” (Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter LXVII). Indeed, Seneca and others argue that the very point of philosophy is so that one can die well, which is indistinguishable from living well. For even a short life, lived fully and in accordance with virtue, can be a Good Life.
Not that it will always be easy. Indeed, even Stoic sages, some of the wisest people in the annals of the Western tradition, struggle deeply with self-annihilation. Seneca writes of his struggles with chronic illness: “In its early stages I refused to let it bother me, being still young enough then to adopt a defiant attitude to sickness and put up with hardships, but eventually I succumbed to it altogether… On many an occasion I felt an urge to cut my life short there and then, and was only held back by the thought of my father, who had been the kindest of fathers to me and was then in his old age. Having in mind not how bravely I was capable of dying but how far from bravely he was capable of bearing the loss, I commanded myself to live.[4] There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.” (Letter LXXVIII).
Clearly, Seneca understands illness and injury intimately. He writes routinely about his struggles with asthma, consumption, and old age. Still, Seneca holds vehemently that with a philosophical, spiritual attitude, we can teach our minds to bear any condition. “My own advice to you – and not only in the present illness but in your whole life as well – is this: refuse to let the thought of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear…You will die not because you are sick but because you are live… What in fact makes people who are morally unenlightened upset by the experience of physical distress is their failure to acquire the habit of contentment with the spirit.” (Letter LXXVIII). Through acceptance and understanding of ourselves and our world, we can face life and death with virtue and grace.
How do we understand ourselves and our world? Through the study of practical philosophy and spirituality. This is a lived philosophy that is more spiritual than academic – instead of listening to the eggheads studying Homer and learning the exact route Odysseus took back to Ithaca, rather, “What you should be teaching me is how I may attain such a love for my country, my father and my wife, and keep on course for those ideals even after a shipwreck… The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling.” (Letter LXXXVIII).
And we achieve this through the Premeditation of Evils: “Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen; but I do know what’s capable of happening – and none of this will give rise to any protest on my part. I’m ready for everything. If I’m let off in any way, I’m pleased… So I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.” (Letter LXXXVIII).
In the end, Seneca urges us to persevere against capricious nature through the study of philosophers, those that have “taught us not just to recognize but to obey the gods, and to accept all that happens exactly as if it were an order from above… He [The Philosopher] has told us not to listen to false opinions, and has weighed and valued everything against standards which are true. He has condemned pleasures an inseparable part of which is subsequent regret, has commended the good things which will always satisfy, and for all to see has made the man who has no need of luck the luckiest man of all, and the man who is master of himself the master of all.” (Letter XC).
This is why I find Seneca’s Stoicism the perfect philosophy for the ailing, be it physically or psychologically. Bad things will happen. But with the proper mindset and virtue, you can persevere and overcome. I am hurt; I can’t move like I am used to or want to. But I have had a chance to better my soul and my mind through this injury. Stoicism as a philosophy is like Bishop, the X-Man superhero from the comics who can absorb whatever damage is thrown at him and turn it into his own energy. Stoicism allows you to take what life tried to break you with to rebuild yourself better than ever. Stoicism is the philosophy of the broken because Stoicism teaches you that you can be happy even when damaged.
I am a broken person. But I am getting better.
[1] I would learn in the physical therapy process that one of the most common lower back injuries they saw was actually old ladies around Thanksgiving, getting turkeys out of ovens using poor form. The weirdest things get you.
[2] Eric Greitens’ Resilience was my reading material: it clarified my thinking and strengthened my spirit. I thought it was a great book of practical philosophy, and I recommend it to all humans out there.
[3] One thing I learned – it does you no better to get injured doing something you like than doing something silly. Injury just sucks.
[4] Seneca’s father being somewhat like Tupac’s mother in Thugz Mansion.