If you wish to make progress, you must
be content in external matters to seem a fool and a simpleton; do not wish men
to think you know anything, and if any should think you to be somebody,
distrust yourself.
For know that it is not easy to keep
your will in accord with nature and at the same time keep outward things; if
you attend to one you must needs neglect the other.
—Epictetus,
The Handbook, Chapter 13 (tr
Matheson)
Being
the outsider and the oddball come very easily to me, not out of any virtue, but
because my very disposition is that of a gadfly and iconoclast. I’m simply too contrary
to conform. Yet I can use this annoying aspect of my personality to my
advantage, if only I remember that I shouldn’t avoid being popular out of stubbornness,
but out of a deliberate conviction that my merit is not measured by others.
I find
that this isn’t just a matter of being indifferent to reputation, but quite
often deliberately avoiding it. As Epictetus suggests, we should be very
careful about being liked, not because being respected is in and of itself bad
at all, but because of the reasons why people might be thinking well of us. All
of us have the weakness of being impressed by appearances over content, and by people
who put on a good show. Is that what actually made someone pay attention to me?
If so, I need to be living more honestly and sincerely.
I always
find that I am most drawn to the very people who do not desire recognition. I
took my family to a medieval fair recently, where there were rows upon rows of
performers and craftsmen, many of them putting on an elaborate show of their
skills or trades. The largest crowds gathered around the biggest spectacles,
but I found myself drawn to an older, unassuming fellow who quietly worked on a
delicate glass painting. I watched and admired his art, and I don’t think he
was even aware that I was standing there. He was absorbed in the joy of his
work, not in the display.
People will
occasionally take interest in my Stoic musings, and perhaps nod in some sort of
agreement, but I do think most of us are hardly aware of how radical a
transformation of self the Stoic Turn entails. I have had to try and teach
myself that all the years of effort at making myself succeed by the measures of
things outside of me was not the way to my happiness.
Though
hardly with any bitterness or malice on my part, I have had to part ways with
many people I love dearly, but who still think that the value of living is in
the achieving of status and recognition. This hardly means, however, that the
person who pursues a Stoic life is lonely or isolated. It simply means that my
relations with others need to flip, such that I am concerned that I myself act
with love, rather than the pursuit of being loved.
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