5. Bonjour to the Stoics - Part 2

No doubt that over the past week, you’ll have been waiting restlessly for the second instalment of the 'Bonjour to the Stoics' double-header.

That, or are still slightly confused as to why I kept on mentioning socks and sliders in the first post. Either way, here we are, part 2!

In post 1, we covered why, for a more emotionally tranquil life, the Stoics advise us to focus our energy and attention on the things that we can control (our thoughts and our actions), and aim to make peace with the things that we can’t control (everything else).

Worth noting that it wasn't as dull as it sounds though (promise!), so check it out if you haven't already.

Following on from this, let's have a look at another big idea from the Stoic Squad (don't worry, I'll never call them that again):

“It’s not what happens to us that affects how we feel, merely our own perception of it.”

I love that! You love that!

How often do we get frustrated, angry, downbeat, and generally annoyed at stuff in life? Probably a bit too often, and definitely more than we’d like to.

However, this idea encourages us not to, as it’s not the annoyance itself that causes our distress, just our own personal interpretation of it.

To see this in action, let's cast our minds back to those strange days when we could take public transport, and look at two scenarios:

Scenario 1

• Event: Some bloke barges onto the train without letting us off. This is irritating.

• Reaction: We get pissed off, we give them a filthy look (with a complimentary loud tut), and generally achieve levels of passive aggression that even Greggy would be proud of. We then, of course, take this frustration and dump it straight onto the next person who is lucky enough to come across us.

Scenario 2:

• Event: Some bloke barges onto the train without letting us off. This is irritating.

• Reaction: Meh, we're just looking forward to getting off the train, so don't even acknowledge Bargey Bob. We laugh at how inconsiderate some people can be, and carry on cheerfully with the rest of our Bob-less day.

We'd probably argue that one of these scenarios is more favourable than the other. Though the event, or the “what happens to us” is exactly the same in both cases. The difference is the reaction, or “our perception of it”, which has resulted in two significantly different outcomes.

This may be a one-off example, but if we think about anything that causes us unnecessary agg - people having needlessly loud conversations, people invading our personal space, people chewing with their mouths open, or just people in general - and the same principle applies.

Basically, we can determine how we react to these situations, and choose whether or not it's worth getting annoyed. As the main man William Shakespeare wrote, "nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so".

The above examples are all fairly trivial, but the strength of this idea is that it’s also applicable in much more extreme, and even horrific, circumstances.

And in recent history, there's been few events more horrific than the Holocaust.

In Jewish psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl's, unbelievably powerful book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, he describes the horrors of the concentration camps, and how he managed to survive them.

One of his key methods for survival was tapping into this Stoic outlook of not being victim to events, but instead being in control of his reaction to them, despite going through unimaginable suffering.

He states “You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but the one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance”.

Incredibly powerful stuff.

A recognition that regardless of the scale of an event, the fact that we have a degree of control over our reaction to it can be fairly liberating. As opposed to being a victim of circumstance, it can allow us to choose to interpret things in a less destructive, and far more favourable way.

This means that instead of letting the rest of our morning go down the pan when confronted by Bargey Bob, we can simply smile, squeeze past, and save our passive aggression for another time.