To the world: Your harmony is mine. Whatever time you choose is the right time. Not late, not early.

To nature: What the turn of your seasons brings me falls like ripe fruit. All things are born from you, exist in you, return to you. –– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.23

My father came from a big farming family with thirteen brothers and sisters. Summers spent with our relatives on the family farm taught me many early lessons about life, death, and loss.

There was almost always someone celebrating a new baby, caring for an aging parent, grieving a family member who had died, or gathering around a relative who needed help. Life and death were woven together in ordinary ways, and no one pretended otherwise. Birth and death were both part of everyday life. Animals were born. Animals died. Neighbours helped one another through illness and loss without expecting life to be perfectly fair.

When the day’s work was finished, the wedding had ended, or the funeral had taken place, there was still bread to bake, vegetables to can, gardens to tend, and even weekend dances to attend in town. When bad things happened, or loss occurred, sorrow was acknowledged, but it wasn't allowed to stop daily life from continuing in its normal course. When I was young, summers were spent in this world and I learned early on that we were expected to accept them and join the family in sharing in those experiences.

Taking life as it comes

When I asked my father about how he approached these same things when he was growing up, I learned that he had his own way of looking at it. He would simply say, “I take life as it comes."

As he grew, he survived accidents on the farm, grueling work operating machinery, dangerous experiences riding the rails during the Great Depression, and combat during the Second World War. He knew, first-hand, that none of us can predict what tomorrow will bring. Yet he never lived with fear. Instead, he accepted each day for what it offered and tried to meet it with steadiness and gratitude.

As time went on and I grew older myself, we spent even more time on the farm, helping my grandmother, who spent years caring for my grandfather through a long illness. He was a very tall man, who stood nearly two feet taller than her, and helping him required strength she probably never imagined she would have possessed.

She lifted him into his chair. She helped bathe him. She prepared homemade soup and patiently fed him when he was too weak to feed himself. I was still quite young when this was happening, but I don’t remember hearing her ever complain or ask why this had happened to them. She simply did what love required every day. She focused on the work that was hers to do instead of wishing life had given her something easier.

Looking back, I realize how much that shaped the way I understand both living and dying. Those experiences and that outlook stayed with me as I grew. Today I recognize something that reminds me very much of Stoicism, and even of ways I learned to engage in Stoic practice before I realized what it was.

When I found myself facing my own frightening health diagnosis about ten years ago, I truly did not know what would happen to me. It is difficult to describe what passes through your mind when you realize your own future is suddenly uncertain. There is fear, of course. There is also a surprising clarity about what matters and what doesn't.

As I recovered, and slowly regained my health, I found myself returning to my father's words, “Take life as it comes.”

Resisting reality does not change it

That doesn’t mean that every circumstance is welcome, only that resisting reality never changes it. We still have choices about how we meet whatever arrives.

Over the years I have mourned my parents, many relatives, dear friends, and the heartbreak of those I knew who ended their own lives. Those losses leave questions that often cannot be answered. They remind me that many people carry burdens we never fully see.

The importance of compassion

I have learned the importance of offering compassion while people are still here, listening more carefully, and letting others know they are not alone. Sometimes our greatest contribution is simply being willing to walk beside another person through difficulty. It encourages me to pay attention to the life that is right in front of me.

Meeting life

My father never quoted the Stoics. My grandmother never read them. Yet when I think about the quiet strength both of them carried through hardship, I realize they understood something the Stoics also understood: Life will always bring joy and sorrow, beginnings and endings, certainty and uncertainty. Our task is not to control which of those arrives. Our task is to meet each one, as best we can, with courage, kindness, and grace.

Shirley Kwosek Sciacca is a writer, living in the midwest, seeking wisdom and resilience through lifelong learning and the practice of Stoic principles.

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