As the year draws to a close it is perhaps time to reflect on the year that has passed.
At the outset I decided to accompany the daily photo project with a dose of Stoicism, using the 366 passages in the Daily Stoic. Have I learned anything?
Why Stoicism?
One thing I’ve always struggled with is knowing how to exist in this world. The first 15 years or so were fairly typical and I think I had a fair grasp of being a normal child and a normal teen, but the wheels started to come off as my twenties approached.
For various reasons I didn’t have a lot of luck with father figures so when those situations arose where the advice of said father figure would be helpful there was none forthcoming.
So, I found myself following the path of least resistance and not really getting anywhere. Between then and now my mental health has been a seemingly well-controlled dumpster fire, at least until I reached out for some help and had some counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy.
The latter made a big difference in figuring out where I was starting to go wrong, helping me retrace my steps and take corrective action. Many people have said that CBT takes some of its inspiration from Stoicism, so I thought I’d try to absorb myself in it.
For the most part it does feel like many of these passages are sinking in. My instant reaction to various issues that crop up is more measured now and I’m less likely to ruminate on various things that bother me.
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…” –Epictetus
Considering the Stoics lived around the time of the Roman Empire there were very few instances where passages from the Daily Stoic felt dated. Granted the book has hand-picked passages from ancient writings and reinterprets them for a modern audience, but the meaning doesn’t seem to have been lost in the previous two thousand years or so.
The premise of the book is a passage a day for 366 days, so as this year was a leap year with, as luck would have it, 366 days it made sense to do it this year. I’m quite glad I did. Each page is a pearl of wisdom you’d hope your wise and knowledgeable father would impart at the dinner table.
Even if you don’t feel lost, like I occasionally do, I suspect most people will get something out of the various teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca all those centuries ago.
The Photos
I know we’re not at the end yet and I still have a week left of work before I see daylight again, but I’m hopefully going to complete another year of taking a photo every day.
By some miracle, quite a few of my shots were picked up by Flickr’s algorithm, so the views and favourites has distorted my stats somewhat, but it’s always a bit of fun when it happens.
I’m going to have a year off from it next year, at least the posting part. I may carry on taking photos in private and only post the good ones, but the routine is healthy and I don’t want to lose that.
