Seen on the street

Yesterday, I received an email from my friend who had earlier challenged me on the need to have a magazine like THE STOIC. He said,

Yesterday, on my way back from visting a friend, I saw this: A very poor woman (maybe a beggar) was given a sandwich and cup of tea by someone. Rather than immediately gobbling up the food, she folded her hands and closed her eyes and said a small prayer. The expression on her face was one of peace and gratitude. Total calm. For someone to be so deprived yet so grateful for the little things in life is something else. For me it was eye-opening.

My friend wanted to know,

Can this be described as a life well-lived by Stoic norms? Does the answer lie in being content with what you have at the moment, every moment?

Our sense of lack

Great questions. One of the major reasons we are unhappy is that we fail to appreciate and be thankful for all that we are given. Instead we constantly look at what we don’t have rather than what we do. The cup is never 90% full. It is always 10% empty. Strangely though, as we try to fill our magic cup, it keeps growing so that it is always 10% empty. So we are forever going after the 10% lack, while life passes us by.

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone. - Stephen Leacock

Even when we are happy with what we have, it doesn’t last long. We are ecstatic about what we have until we find out that others have a lot more. We fail to enjoy what we have becuase we only look at what we don’t have. Marcus Aurelius warned us about this.

Don’t dream about things you don’t have. Instead, think about the best things you now have and how much you would crave them if you didn’t have them. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.27.

Wealth is not wanting to possess more and more things, but not wanting things to possess at all.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. - Epictetus

It is wonderful to be grateful for whatever we have at any time. Epicurus, the philospher of pleasure, had this to say:

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for. - Epicurus

We crave what we don’t have

Yes, if we look at the things we have, they are all the things we once desired; the car we wanted, the spouse we desired, the house we hoped to buy, the job we went after... Now we have them all. But soon enough they are not as attractive as they once seemed. Maybe the next car, a bigger house, a more expensive dress, a better job, or a higher social status would do it.

As we ignore the things we have in a quest for things we don’t have, life is passing by. In the end, our life is an unending quest for what we don’t have rather than a joyful journey of enjoyment of what we do have. The fact is, if we are not content with what we have, we will continue be poor no matter what we possess.

Anyone who does not think that what they have is more than ample is an unhappy person, even if they are master of the whole world. - Epicurus We don’t take the time to be grateful for the things we have.

We don’t take the time to savour what is given to us because we are too busy going after things we don’t have. That’s where gratitude comes in. Gratitude is the art of appreciating what we do have. It is giving up a sense of entitlement. It is realizing that we are not entitled to anything. It is the art of receiving things and being happy they came our way. Gratefulness is a way of acknowledging the importance of what we have at the moment and enjoying it.

Stoicism and gratitude

Being grateful is big in Stoicim. The much beloved Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has twelve chapters or “books”. The very first is a book of thanks to the many people who shaped him. The great Stoic, sitting in the battlefield towards the end of his life, wasn’t thinking about his life and accomplishments. He was offering thanks to those who shaped him.

Seneca wrote an entire book on gratitude called On Benefits. The opening sentence reads,

Of all the faults of those who live carelessly without thinking, there is hardly anything that is more hurtful to society than this: We neither know how to give nor receive a benefit. (Lightly paraphrased.)

He repeats his message in one of his letters to Lucilius:

Of all the evils of wanting more, the worst is ingratitude…[Those with no sense of gratitude] are never satisfied no matter how much they are given. Their wants keep growing. Those who are focused on receiving forget what they actually have received. - Seneca, Moral Letters 72

Yes, we neither know how to give nor how to receive. What my friend saw was an example of someone who knew how to receive what was given to her – with appreciation and gratitude.

Thanking the invisible givers

Even when try to be thankful we tend not to think of those who enrich our life. When we eat, we don’t give any thought to those who cultivated the field, tilled the field, grew the crop, transported it across the country, those who stacked the food in supermarkets and the checkout person, to mention a few. We don’t think about the air we breathe, the sunlight and the moonlight that are free for us to enjoy.

I am not suggesting that we think about this all the time, but it might be worthwhile to think on these things from time to time to appreciate what we are given and how many people it takes to make our life work.

Focusing on what we have rather than on what we lack

But why? Why should we should we bother?

The main thing about gratitude is that it takes away our attention from a feeling of lack, which can never be filled and puts it on things we have, which is more than enough for us to be happy. After all, Stoics were clear: happiness cannot be found in external things. We can find it only from within. Things we have are externals. They cannot possibly make us happy in the long run.

Gratitude, on the other hand, is way of appreciating what we have and what we are given. It is not external to us. So, it would not matter if we believe in God, if we don’t believe in God or if we are simply agnostic. It would not matter whether those who we are grateful for will ever know about it or not. It would not matter if what we are thankful for are animals, vegetables, or minerals. Like everything we do in Stoicism, we do things because they build our character, strengthen our virtues.

Going back to my friend’s question,

Can this be described as a life well-lived by Stoic norms? Does the answer lie in being content with what you have at the moment, every moment?

I would have to say, yes. A life of authentic gratitude can be described as a life well lived by Stoic norms.

The answer does lie in being content at the moment, every moment.

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