To The Stoa, with Love...
The past year has been in the minds of most people. Its contents are filled with many different experiences and emotions of many people. More than one person could contain. For myself, I could say that my world did not turn upside down, but in fact, slowed down. Before all of this, I had been obsessive about advancement, which mostly applied professionally. My life reflected that of a person who had eschewed personal quality of life in service to (what I thought) the thing that gave me a sense of purpose. A few times in my life I had taken the time to do some deep work inside myself. Up to the point of last March, it had been years since this work had been done. There needed to be a re-reflection, a death, and a re-birth. I knew it and felt it long before the lockdowns were put into place. I had never been a stranger to loneliness, but I had embraced it throughout my life as something that I could use for a better purpose. I realized that I took a lot for granted. Everyday human connection was one of them. Even though most of the people I interacted with each day only amounted to surface-level corporate-speak, it was something. Throughout the year, I would miss those small conversations with fellow employees, even though these conversations were never satisfying. I felt a sense of emptiness, lacking substance and meaning. This is nothing new because I’ve always felt this way. When life calmed down for me after the chaos Covid, the slowing down process gave me a chance to integrate a purposeful routine. There was time for reading, writing, learning, and best of all, exploring.
I found it or it found me, or most likely, I was algorithmically encouraged to explore The Stoa. YouTube has many faults with the recommendation system being one of them. This was another group that I absolutely did not have the time to explore. Three other groups were already taking my attention daily and I found myself trying to cram as much work as I could while at home. At this point, I had also picked up writing again, even though I had to force myself to pick up the pencil to get something onto the page. My active interests had always been in technology, but when it was time for me to write, I always searched within my current philosophy to root out the thing I didn’t know.
I made it to The Stoa through a series of rabbit holes which seemed to start in 2018, where I really became serious about exploring what I actually believed and what needed to die. I did not realize that the pandemic of 2020 would allow scorched-earth tactics, but I found that I was on my way to the Eleusis of my own creation. There was a strong felt sense of needing more and knowing that more was out there. Additionally, I always (daily) sprinkled in a little bit of what the fuck are we doing and does any of this even matter. The subject matter of those questions is not even important, but I had the sense that if there was a time to “figure it out”, the time was now. The month or day of my first interaction with this community is something I don’t remember much, but I know that it was an older video of Daniel Schmachtenberger posted on the Stoa YouTube channel. By this point I had consumed just about all of his uploaded content which I supplemented with content from Jordan Hall, Ken Wilbur, Rebel Wisdom, and Future Thinkers (all consumed in reverse-chronological order)(background: I am not a philosopher, did not study philosophy at a university, and a complete noob in this thought space.). If I did not know anything previously, I definitely know much less now, and I love it. I did not know that I had always wanted to be a galaxy brain. I found out that I had been tripping over my own epistemology for longer than I could remember. My ego needed to die. I needed Eleusis. I needed to die before I died.
As much as I’ve been looking for a rite of passage, I’ve never found one. To me, searching is what matters. This seems to be what I’m telling myself as there is no replacement for learning by going through hard things. I definitely do not want to go to hell and back, but the raw experience is something I have searched for since as far back as I can remember. Since the Great Slowdown (that’s what I’m calling my lockdown experience), I’ve had the chance to go on a journey of self-exploration and do real shadow work. I do not feel the need to express everything I’ve learned in the past year. The things I do want to express are gratitude and respect to someone who provided the space for me to explore, learn, and grow more than I have my whole adult life. I had the opportunity to contend with the worst parts of myself, bring them to light, and crush them. The leftover bits were used to create the future image of the Stoic that I want to become. I increased the quality of my marriage, integrated embodiment practices, started projects I was afraid of, and felt the full energy of the “Daemon”. Even in light of this, I know that the journey to enlightenment is never over.
I don’t think that I will understand the pressure that was on the Steward during this past year. When I run the simulation in my head and try to imagine what it would be like to take on the burden of stewarding this space, the thought of having no end would be quite overwhelming. As humans, it seems that we like having time frames. A beginning and an end. It’s something to work towards and to measure ourselves by it. I tried to imagine the pull from other members of the community. The question that arose was this: “How much of yourself is left at the end of the day, week, month, and year?”. It may depend on the person who has assumed the role of the steward. Regardless of the type of person this leader is, I do think that in any instance it can be said that being pulled in many directions is difficult. Possibly, more difficult than multi-directional pulling is managing the expectations of others.
If this does end, I understand (from a participant’s perspective) why. Maybe it’s time to take what we learned and find our way. Maybe it’s time for us to figure out how to seriously play without the comforting presence of our virtual philosophers. If this doesn’t end, let us strive even more to steal the culture, and do our best to cultivate knowledge at the knife’s edge.
To the Steward. With Love…