Day 364 - The Stoic exercises

Listening to The Waking Up course for daily meditation, I learned about 3 Stoic exercises that help provide perspective:

Negative visualisation

Imagining how things could be worse, can help you realise that the way things are isn’t so bad. For example, I might not entirely enjoy the cold coming from Autumn (and soon, Winter), and so I wish for a home that had under-the-floor heating. By imagining how it could be worse, like I could be living in an old house with no heating at all with a drafty window I can’t close, I come to realise that what I have now is enough.

The last time

Contemplating the idea that there will always be something that I do for the last time, can help ground myself in the moment— and might even get me to do something I haven’t done in a long time.

Memento mori— “Remember death”, is a latin phrase to remind us that we will die some day. And everything we do, we will at some point do for the last time. Sometimes we’ll know it’s the last time, like a prisoner on death row eating their last meal. And other times we won’t.

By pondering if the thing we’re doing now, will be the last time we ever do it or not, makes us enjoy it more.

There’s an exercise called “Resetting the last time”, where you think about the last time you’ve done something and you do it more recently in order to “reset” the length of time since you’ve done it. This helps me to enjoy the things I thought I had lost interest in, or maybe I’ve outgrown. When was the last time I skipped a rock? Or carved something out of wood?

Living the dream

We’re all living the dream— it’s just that in most cases it’s not our dream we’re living, but somebody else’s. By empathising with people who might be less fortunate than myself, it gives me perspective and gratitude for what I have.