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\nFor almost two years now, Americans have been confronted daily by ominous tidings. We are living through stressful times. Reading the news feels awful; ignoring it doesn\u2019t feel right either.<\/p>\n
\nFor almost two years now, Americans have been confronted daily by ominous tidings. We are living through stressful times. Reading the news feels awful; ignoring it doesn\u2019t feel right either.<\/p>\n
Psychologist Terri Apter\u00a0recently wrote about<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cphenomenon in human behavior sometimes described as \u2018the hive switch,\u2019 where “catastrophic events eliminate selfishness, conflict and competitiveness, rendering humans as co-operative as ultra-social bees.\u201d<\/p>\n But if hurricanes, earthquakes or volcanoes trigger the hive switch, does this principle hold for man-made catastrophes?<\/p>\n What about the immigration policy that has been separating children from their parents? School shootings, suicides, ecological disaster?<\/p>\n What about the flood of frightening and infuriating news that splashes against us daily?<\/p>\n In response to all this, people are hardly swarming into a cooperative hive. On the contrary, our human qualities of imagination, alertness and compassion seem to be turning against us. To imagine the suffering of our fellow beings and the future of our beleaguered planet provokes rage, dread and an overwhelming sense of helplessness.<\/p>\n What, if anything, can we do?<\/p>\n Rage and dread can morph into political activism, but it\u2019s hard not to feel that any change is too little and too late.<\/p>\n The children who have been separated from their parents, for example, even if they\u2019re all reunited, which doesn\u2019t seem likely, will bear the psychic scars for the rest of their lives, as physician Danielle Ofri has\u00a0pointed out eloquently in Slate<\/a>.<\/p>\n How should people react to\u00a0rising suicide rates<\/a>? Perhaps, judging from much recent coverage, the most we can hope to do is muster enough insight and hindsight to try to prevent the next one.<\/p>\n Yet this spring\u2019s exhaustive coverage of a\u00a0pair of celebrity suicides<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade \u2013 sent me back to the\u00a0Stoic philosophers<\/a>, thinkers who flourished, particularly in Rome, in the first and second centuries. Uninterested in abstruse speculations, these philosophers stressed ethics and virtue; they were concerned with how to live and how to die. Stoic psychology offered and still offers help working with the mind to calm our anxieties and help us to fulfill our function as human beings.<\/p>\n Both Bourdain and Spade, creative and successful personalities, icons of glamour and achievement \u2013 particularly Bourdain, whose restless and courageous explorations of various corners of the world inspired countless viewers and readers \u2013 turned out to have been vulnerable people.<\/p>\n William B. Irvine, whose 2009\u00a0\u201cA Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy<\/a>\u201d I\u2019ve been rereading, usefully distills from his four favorite Stoic writers,\u00a0Seneca<\/a>,\u00a0Epictetus<\/a>,\u00a0Musonius Rufus<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Marcus Aurelius<\/a>, two salient Stoic techniques for combating dark thoughts. I\u2019ll continue this teaching tradition by distilling Irvine.<\/p>\n The advice of writers like Seneca and Epictetus feels remarkably germane. The kinds of misery that are often mentioned in connection with suicidal impulses, such as fear and anxiety, are perennial components of the human condition. When we speak of a suicidal person wrestling with demons\u00a0\u2013 a word as old as Homer \u2013<\/a>\u00a0that\u2019s what we\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n The Stoics teach that you can try to counter your demons \u2013 not with talk therapy, let alone pharmaceuticals, but by working with your mind.<\/p>\n The first technique is negative visualization: Imagine the worst so as to be prepared for it.<\/p>\n Most likely the worst will never happen. The bad things that can and probably will happen are likely to be milder than the worst thing you can think of. You can feel both relieved that the worst hasn\u2019t happened and also somewhat mentally bolstered against the worst possibility.<\/p>\n \u201cHe robs present ills of their power,\u201d\u00a0wrote Seneca<\/a>, \u201cwho has perceived their coming beforehand.\u201d<\/p>\n Elsewhere,\u00a0Seneca writes<\/a>, \u201cTrees that have grown in a sunny vale are fragile. It is therefore to the advantage of good men, and it enables them to live without fear, to be on terms of intimacy with danger and to bear with serenity a fortune that is ill only to him who bears it ill.\u201d<\/p>\n Much the same point is made by Edgar, disguised as Mad Tom, when he observes in \u201cKing Lear\u201d that\u00a0\u201cthe worst is not\/So long as we can say \u2018This is the worst.\u2019\u201d<\/a>\u00a0The very fact of being able to comment on how bad things are \u2013 and such bemoaning is now a daily ritual for many of us \u2013 means that we have survived.<\/p>\n The second Stoic self-help technique is what Irvine calls\u00a0the dichotomy of control<\/a>: Divide situations into those you have some control over and those you have no control over.<\/p>\n Epictetus\u00a0observes that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cOf the things that exist, Zeus has put some in our control and some not in our control. Therefore\u2026we must concern ourselves absolutely with the things that are under our control and entrust the things not in our control to the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n Irvine\u00a0adds a third category<\/a>, thereby transforming the dichotomy into what he calls a trichotomy: things we have no control over, things we have complete control over and things we have some degree of control over.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t control whether the sun rises tomorrow.<\/p>\n We can control whether we have a third bowl of ice cream, what sweater we choose to wear or whether to press SEND.<\/p>\n And, as for suicides, school shootings, agonized children torn from their parents? We can do something. We can vote, run for office, organize, contribute money or goods. In these ventures we can cooperate with our neighbors and colleagues, acting as hive-like as possible without being paralyzed by anguish.<\/p>\n Those fortunate enough to experience private joy still sense the shadow of public dread. Yet joy is still joy; life still needs to be lived.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re baseball players, we can play baseball. If we\u2019re grandparents, we can take our grandchildren to the park. We can read \u2013 not only the news, but fiction and history that takes us out of our moment. And we can read poetry, which has the power of distilling our times, of making our moral dilemmas, if not precisely soluble, beautifully clear.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re poets, we can write poetry \u2013 not a community venture, ordinarily, but what these days is ordinary? Public anguish makes its way into private lives, and some of the best new poetry braids public and private together. I myself both read and write poetry \u2013 both activities over which I have a good deal of control. And the poetry I\u2019ve been reading is riveting.<\/p>\n An eloquent recent poem that encompasses the ethical dissonance between home and homelessness, safety and danger, is\u00a0A.E. Stallings\u2019s \u201cEmpathy<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Interestingly, the Stoic notion of negative visualization animates the poem\u2019s argument: how good that I and my family are snug in our beds at home and not tossing on a raft in the dark. It could be so much worse:<\/p>\n My love, I\u2019m grateful tonight<\/p>\n Our listing bed isn\u2019t a raft<\/p>\n Precariously adrift<\/p>\n As we dodge the coast-guard light\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n And in its final stanza the poem unflinchingly rejects the easy notion of empathy as smug and superficial and hypocritical:<\/p>\n Empathy isn\u2019t generous,<\/p>\n It\u2019s selfish. It\u2019s not being nice<\/p>\n To say I would pay any price<\/p>\n Not to be those who\u2019d die to be us.<\/em><\/p>\n Rejecting what poet\u00a0William Blake called \u201csingle vision<\/a>,\u201d Stallings courageously sees, and seems miraculously to write from, both sides.<\/p>\n She also manages to live on both sides. For the past year and a half, she has been doing extraordinary work with\u00a0refugee women and children in Athens<\/a>. Poet A.E. Stallings doing hand-rhymes and songs with refugee children in Athens. Photo: Rebecca J. Sweetman, Author provided<\/p><\/div><\/p>\nListen to Seneca and Epictetus<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Be ready<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Divide and conquer \u2013 or not<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Play baseball, go to the park<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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