Action for October

The Stoic philosophers could not be clearer: Stoicism is not a philosophy for analysis and debating.  It's a philosophy to be applied to life.

Partly, Stoicism is an outlook, a consistent view on life that should affect the way we respond to events, and the way we view our lives. In that sense, Stoicism is a passive philosophy.  Stoicism does have an active component, though.  Besides just waiting for events to come to you, you have to prepare.  There are things we need to do in order to keep us on a good path.

It is my intention to explore these active techniques.  So far, I haven't made a serious effort, since I'm primarily interested in Stoicism, and I do not self-identify as a Stoic.  But I think Stoicism is interesting enough to test practically, not just intellectually.

Now is the start of October, and I'd like to make a change for the next month.  I plan to meditate at least 20 minutes each day.  I know meditation is not classically Stoic, but the practice seems to align pretty well with Stoic thought, as I've written about before.  Perhaps next month I'll do a more traditionally Stoic activity such as nightly reviews, or negative visualization.

I'll write more about my meditation practice in the next entry, and I hope by the end of the month I'll have something interesting to report about the effects of meditation.