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Stoicism is Preparation For the Worst Day of Your Life
•Jon Brooks
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A tragedy happened close to home recently, and it knocked me sideways. This episode is me thinking out loud about death, life, and gratitude in the middle of that, and about the uncomfortable truth that a lot of Stoic practice is really preparation for the worst day of your life.
It is a more personal one. I do not try to tidy it into a neat lesson.
Where I live, it's quite a close knit community, quite a close knit series of towns. There's a real sense of community. A lot of the people living here know their neighbors well, have grown up with their neighbors, are still good friends with their childhood schoolmates. My aunt and uncle met when they were thirteen, and now they're approaching sixty. This is not very uncommon. A few days ago I was alerted to the news of a tragedy. I didn't know the people involved in the tragedy personally, but the town that these people are from I go to many times a week, and there is one degree of separation between me and this family. One of my own family members was particularly close to this family that was involved in this tragedy. A young mother in her twenties and her partner were in a car with the lady's young son and young daughter. The daughter, I believe, was four years old, and the son, I believe, was three years old. They had been out for the day and were now driving to go and see the father of the children to drop them off, I believe. On one of the main motorways, three lanes, the car was involved in a collision. The four year old girl died. The three year old boy went to hospital, was in critical condition, and the mother was hospitalized with some injuries but nothing life-threatening. The lady's partner was mostly okay. A few days later, the three-year-old boy also passed away in hospital. So you have a mother and a father that have lost their three-year-old son and their four-year-old daughter. This story really hit home for me and it's very heartbreaking to hear this story. It especially hits home because I have a three-year-old son myself. I don't think if I heard this story five, six, seven years ago I would have felt the impact of it as much as I do now. Now I can relate to the parents a lot more than I could have previously. Because I come from a place that is a close knit community. The details surrounding this story are very different from hearing about it on the news. I know the roads and the schools and the types of people that were involved. It's now February. I know that nursery started for three year olds. I know that the new term for school started a month ago. I know that at the beginning of the year, especially with the COVID situation and the pandemic, people were really hoping for a positive twenty twenty two. I know about the effort, the daily effort that it takes to raise a child every day. It is of course extremely rewarding, but it is extremely difficult to have a routine, to have food, to manage one's emotions, to navigate power battles, to nurture a child to be emotionally intelligent, to find things to do each day. There's a lot of work and energy and love that is poured into this project of raising children. To have a child taken away from you, a child that you've spent three years bonding with and loving each day and seeing blossom and grow is catastrophically heartbreaking. To have two in the same week, the level of sudden grief and disorientation that that could cause is almost impossible to fathom through imagination. So what is the significance or the relevance of this story for you? You often hear people say that you don't know what's around the corner. You don't know what tragedy and difficulty might be lurking. And yet, even though we understand this and we might give that advice to other people, we don't really live as if that is true. Many of us don't really expect to have heart disease or cancer, or to lose loved ones unexpectedly, or to get into accidents, or to be made redundant in work. And I'm definitely not advocating that we worry about these things at all, because that would just be suffering now when there is nothing to suffer about if the present is acceptable. To me this story, this event is a reminder, a visceral reminder that maybe one day we will look back on our social media accounts a week ago, a month ago, and not even be able to recognize the situation and be completely shocked about how difficult things became very quickly. It's quite possible that we might have a skip in our step and expect the future to be very bright, and before we know it, tragedy has come. Catastrophe has come. As practicing stoics and individuals who are pursuing wisdom and a spiritual life, in some sense we are training for the worst days of our lives. That's one way to think about it. We are also training to deeply appreciate the ordinary days of our lives. After really sitting with this tragedy that has happened, I can now feel a deep sense of gratitude about the struggles of parenting, the tantrums that I have to navigate. Because not having them would be so much worse. It's not about no longer do I have to deal with a developing young mind, but I get to. That's a perspective shift that the great writer Seth Godin has wrote about once. The perspective shift from I have to versus I get to. That can make all of the difference. One is a victim mentality and the other one is a voluntary and courageous step into something. When we get reminded about facts like our mortality, the impermanence of life, the fickleness of fortune, the changing of seasons, when we get reminded to not take things for granted. You might recognize that it doesn't last forever. Maybe a few days go by and you get distracted again. That's okay. This is something to frequently remind yourself about, to take opportunities to remind yourself about. So I would encourage you to think about the individuals in the world right now who are setting about their day just like it's any other day. Maybe it's even a productive or good day or joy-filled day. And those individuals, they don't know it yet, are about to experience the worst day of their lives. If you're listening to this now, I really hope that you're not going to experience the worst day of your life. I really hope that your day turns out well. But the fact that it's possible, even a small possibility, that things could be taken from you, I encourage you to cherish what you have while you have it. Today, now, tomorrow, and beyond.
