#roger johnston

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Monks - I Hate You

[gettothedancing]

Stoicism Saved Me

It is difficult to describe what war does to a person. During recovery, I could tell that my deployment had changed me. I felt betrayed by my country, coopted to fight for profit and gain. I had seen so much suffering. The anger was poisoning everything. My therapist brought up Stoic thinkers during my therapy. I started there.

For me this quote by Marcus Aurelius in Meditations was the starting point of my Stoic practice, “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” So how does this apply to driving? Well, the answer is relatively straightforward; you have no control over other drivers, the street conditions, and traffic signals/signs; you only have control over your own driving. Period. When I first got home, I was very outside focused when driving. I would full on rage at other drivers, “what is that idiot doing?” and other profanity-laced variations. My daughters used to laugh at me and call me the Road Raged Dad. So, the first application for me began by asking a simple question: “Do you have control over what other drivers are doing?” The answer is always no. “Then why are you getting angry over something you can not control?”

At first, my responses to that question were some variation of the other driver was intentionally trying to make me mad. “That SOB knew I was coming and got over anyway,” for example. Which invariably leads to another question: “Are people intentionally trying to make you upset driving?” Of course they are not, most of them are driving for their own self-interest, trying to get to where they are going, caught up in their own world of concerns. Marcus Aurelius had a remedy for this false sense of injury and rationalized anger comes from a misapplied sense of justice, “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

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roger johnston

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Monks