Stoic Gratitude For Difficult Days

The Stoics used comparisons to others strategically to help them generate love, appreciation, and wisdom. The "invisible dream technique" has you connect with the idea that the very life you are living, who are currently alive, or who have lived in the past is indeed a dream life. The very things you take for granted each day are the same things other people right now would consider a great blessing. When we see our life as someone else's dream life, we will once again remember our long-forgotten abundance.

The second meditation will not have you compare yourself to others, but instead to an alternate version of yourself. It is difficult to remember the bad decisions you didn't make, and it is difficult to have a long-term appreciation for the misfortune you were lucky enough to escape. Here we look back over your life and take stock of all the suffering you have been fortunate enough to avoid. Something deep inside you has brought you to this point - a guiding voice, a protector. It is time to bask in the wonder of waking up each day with the life you have, free of all the suffering you have escaped.

Negative visualization is a technique that has you rehearse losing things that are dear to you. When you do this, you build resilience because you learn to cope with loss, but more importantly, you learn to stop taking things for granted. We all know the cliche, "You don't know what you had until it's gone." Negative visualization is the systematic training of that idea, so the relationships, possessions, and conditions of your life will once again sparkle through the fresh eyes of gratitude.

The fourth meditation will help you see all of the invisible and magic conditions of life that make everything possible. There is so much going on beneath the surface of existence that we take for granted such as the way our societies are run, the way we get access to food and water, the statistical likelihood of being born, and the way the atmosphere is perfectly attuned to our survival. To allow oneself to become oblivious to the awe of ordinary life is a mistake that we will put right in this lesson. It's time to once again see the beauty of a raindrop and feel the vitality of a single breath of cold air.

So far we have used Stoic techniques to deepen our appreciation for ordinary life and the things we take for granted. In the final three meditations, we switch gears and learn to find radical gratitude even in adversity and struggle. The Stoics saw adversity as the raw material to build robust things. No matter what is happening, there is always some good that will come from it, some unforeseen benefit or lesson. In the following Hermes' Wand meditation, we train our minds to transmute setbacks and misfortune into wisdom and positivity, so we can act with greater clarity as we problem solve.

The Stoics realized that we can never really see what we are made of or have our character revealed until we experience adversity. When we watch a movie, we find great joy in seeing the hero navigate obstacles and overcome them. In fact, it is the obstacles that bring the hero forth. From this line of thinking, adversity can be seen as a privilege, an opportunity to put into practice all of our Stoic training. In lesson six, we explore this radical new lens through which to view adversity so that the next time we are challenged instead of shying away from life, we boldly turn toward it.

The seventh and final meditation is all about endings. In our lives, there is always a "last time" for everything we do. There is the last time we ate certain food, the last time we spoke to certain people, and the last time we watched a favorite cartoon as a child. By contemplating these last times, we learn to see our current reality with more meaning and poignancy. Life is finite, and we are mortal. When we remember this obvious yet hidden truth, it is impossible to feel anything other than radical gratitude.