Let it be

Get out of your own way. Being yourself isn’t something you have to do. You were born yourself, and you didn’t even have to try. In fact, trying is the whole problem. You can’t try to be. You can only let yourself be.

PART FOUR

Sometimes as an antidote

 To fear of death,

 I eat the stars.

 Rebecca Elson, “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” A Responsibility to Awe

The sky

Imagine if you had never seen the night sky.

Imagine if the night sky only existed once in every lifetime. Imagine if you could only once look up and see those stars. It would probably be one of the highlights of your existence. It would possibly be known as The Night of Starry Miracles or The Amazing Moment of Witnessing the Shining Universe, or something a bit catchier. We would all step away from our sofas and another evening spent in front of our streaming service of choice and head outside and look upward, openmouthed in wonder at the thousands of pinpoints of light sent through time and space. We would be there gazing at the moon and trying to distinguish stars from planets. Wondering which one was Venus.

The point is, it would be nearly impossible to take the sight of such a one-off sky for granted.

And yet we obviously take the night sky for granted. And of course it would be entirely impractical to suggest that—even on cloudless nights with low light pollution—we should be out there gazing up in sentimental wonder at constellations. But it is always good to know how wonderful so much of life would instantly seem if it was made rare. We are so blessed with an abundance of wonder on this planet, and in this universe, that we are numb to it. And it is often only in times of intense crisis that such things become apparent. That we can each see ourselves, in philosopher Alan Watts’s phrase, as “an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”

Watch the stars

I can remember one night in the middle of a depression feeling suicidal and looking up at a cloudless sky of infinite stars. I felt a mental pain so deep it was physical. But seeing the sky, our small glimpse of the universe, flooded me with hope that I would one day be able to appreciate such a sight again. Beauty is any moment that makes us gasp with the hope and wonder of life, and the world is full of such moments. They shine in the dark. And they are ours for the taking. “Dwell on the beauty of life,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations two millennia ago, “watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”

The universe is change

When he wrote Meditations, Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world. He had, quite literally, a whole empire at his disposal. Cities, armies, palaces. All were his. He spent over a decade, from the year 161 to 180, as Roman emperor during the “Golden Age.” And yet he resisted seeking any contentment in his status and power, in favor of simplicity, consultation, and a cosmic perspective. He believed watching the stars was important and talks about Pythagoras—the early Greek philosopher and founder of Pythagoreanism—as his influence here.

The Pythagoreans saw gazing up at the sky not just as a pleasant thing to do, but an insight into a divine order. Because stars are all separate, but all together in an order. For the Stoics, looking at them was looking at unveiled glimpses of divinity—and also fragments of Nature.

It is not just the sky or the stars, then, that are important, but what we think when we look at them. Our connection to the shifting world around and above us.

“The universe is change,” wrote Marcus Aurelius. “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

Even a man in charge of an empire could look at the stars and feel happily small in the grand universal order of things.

The sky doesn’t start above us. There is no starting point for sky. We live in the sky.

The Stoic slave

My all-time favorite philosopher is Epictetus. Like Marcus Aurelius, he was a Stoic who lived in Ancient Rome. Unlike Marcus Aurelius, he wasn’t an emperor. In fact, he was about as far away from an emperor as you can get.

He had a tough life. Born into slavery almost two thousand years ago, his name literally meant “acquired.” He spent all his youth as a slave, though he was allowed to study Stoic philosophy. He was also physically disabled—possibly due to his leg being broken by his master. He spent most of his life in physical pain.

Epictetus eventually became a free man, for reasons that aren’t clear, and began to teach philosophy, but even then he lived very simply, with few possessions, and lived alone for much of his life. Records show that in his old age he adopted a child of a friend and raised that child with a woman whom Epictetus may or may not have married.

Epictetus was a very modern philosopher in some ways. His worldview is probably best summed up by his statement “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters.” It is a philosophy that has been credited with helping people in tough circumstances, from prisoners of war to people experiencing depression. The psychologist Albert Ellis, one of the originators of cognitive behavioral therapy, cites this Epictetus quote as influencing his entire therapeutic approach: “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.”

Epictetus reminds us that when we tie our happiness to external things, we are essentially giving up the idea of self-control and placing our well-being on forces outside of ourselves. Whatever it is—earnings, relationships, wanting a family, a Lamborghini, winning the lottery, going viral on social media—“Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.” And of course, even when we get the things we think we want, the impact is often beyond our prediction—see, for instance, the studies into how winning the lottery often has a negative impact on the winner’s happiness.

The comfort of Epictetus is the deepest comfort there is. It isn’t the reassurance of believing great things will happen to us, it is that of knowing that even in pain or sadness or confinement, the mind has power to choose its response to the events in our lives. Even the very biggest things. Pain, loss, grief, death. “I cannot escape death,” he said, “but at least I can escape the fear of it.” Epictetus, in short, gives us control in an uncontrollable world. The control of accepting a lack of control. The control of response.

Caterpillar

In the dark cocoon, a caterpillar falls apart. It disintegrates in its own enzymes. It becomes liquid. Mush. Caterpillar soup. And then, slowly, it is reborn a butterfly. Cocoons aren’t a cozy quiet resting place. Cocoons must feel a pretty horrendous place for a caterpillar. Yet, the caterpillar’s fate has proven a great metaphor for our own misfortunes and struggles. The greatest changes stem from the darkest experiences. We fall apart to become new. We go through the dark to fly in the sun.