The sound I woke up to at 6:30am wasn’t my alarm. I hadn’t set it, since I was running a fever and didn’t have much planned. After a few moments of assessing impressions through my still-waking and illness-muddled mind, I realized that that was the sound of air raid sirens.

Our Tel Aviv walking tour guide pointed some out a few days prior. I knew that rocket attacks were quite possible in Israel. So I woke my still-sleeping partner and we took shelter. After the sirens stopped, we went back to bed, only to be roused by more sirens shortly after.

As October 7th wore on, it slowly became apparent that these were not just sporadic rocket attacks, but much more. Hamas passed the Gaza border, killing and kidnapping many people in southern Israel. It was possible that this could escalate into a much larger conflict. 

We sheltered in place for a few days. My partner organized a flight out of Israel while I found a doctor to get treated for my illness. I started to feel better. Since there were no rockets entering Tel Aviv for a couple of days, we decided to go for a walk to look at some street art the day before our flight out of Israel. However, the walk didn’t last long: the air raid sirens started wailing again. We took cover in an area full of old buildings with no apparent shelters, following people who were running like they knew where they were going.

We left the following day, after Hamas made a statement they were hoping to target the airport specifically. 

During all of this, I wasn’t afraid. And this has little or nothing to do with my Stoic practice.
I recall putting things in perspective, which helped a bit. Tel Aviv was still a much safer place to be than Southern Israel at the time, and was and still is much safer than what Gazans are going through currently. I also knew that the Iron Dome was highly effective, and that the booms I was hearing were mostly interceptions or missiles falling into unpopulated areas. But I’m somewhat certain that these thoughts would have come to me whether or not I was a Stoic practitioner. 

Looking back at some other times in my life that some would consider crises, I’ve kept a somewhat level head for the most part. Putting things in perspective is something I just do naturally at times like these. Being able to run to a shelter when the sirens went off without worrying too much didn’t require work or effort to make progress. So while I consider myself a prokopton (progressor), this is not evidence of my progress.

What tends to get to me more are what many people would consider smaller matters. I used to have trouble opening bills because I was anxious about the bad news it contained. During my time in Israel, I received a very large surprise medical bill via email. I opened it immediately, felt the protopassion of anxiety, worked with the impression that it was bad, and coped much better than I would have in the past. 

For me, keeping cool during missile attacks was not a sign of progress. Opening an email was. Talking about myself is also something that naturally comes hard for me. Simply writing about my experience above brought up a host of impressions that I had to work with. But I ultimately wrote it anyway. Another small sign of progress.

We all have different strengths and weaknesses that Stoic psychological theory ultimately pins down to what we hold is good or bad. That small subset of emotions that Stoics call the passions arise when you agree with your first impression of something is good or bad when in fact it’s not. In short, passions arise when we assent to false value judgments. The goal of Stoic practice is to not buy into our first impressions of what’s good or bad, to question them, and to slowly change them over time.

But we all have different sets of false value judgments. Some people may highly value wealth, others may not. Some people may be naturally and genuinely kind. Others may not. Thus, someone being generous and kind could be a mark of progress if they were cruel earlier in their lives. Or it could be just their natural disposition. There’s no good way for an outside observer to know the difference.

There is no universal sign of Stoic progress. Since Stoicism is best used as a personal practice instead of a yardstick to measure others by, our focus should be on improving our own personal weaknesses, whatever they may be, and however large – or small – they appear to others.

Gregory Lopez is the founder of the New York City Stoics, co-founder of The Stoic Fellowship, co-author of A Handbook for New Stoics, and a Modern Stoicism team member. He can be reached at: https://greglopez.me/contact/https://greglopez.me/contact/

---