On Living in the Moment Part II

Hello everybody, how you doing? I hope all is well. Welcome to another lecture. Today we're sleeping with on living in the moment and this will be a guided philosophical meditation. Starting with seven questions, then we're gonna go to Senica from the Stoke School of Philosophy that I'm gonna present some general thoughts from Pierre Hadot on the Epicurean School of Philosophy, all of which again will pertain to thinking about how we can in the healthiest way possible, relate to the past and the future and the present. So let's get started. Here are seven questions. As I said, I recommend, at the very least, giving some focus to each, right? Maybe you're going for a walk now, maybe you're just sitting down relaxing, maybe you're in the car driving cool. Just try to focus here a little bit and really turn your kind of thinking towards yourself, right? Your own ways of thinking, acting and feeling. And also if you have the chance of the opportunity to grab a pen and grab a piece of paper, that also suggests that as well. So here we go. Finish the sentence for the first two. I am fully awake and engaged when I. Next one, I am asleep when I'm awake when. And this kind of asks another question too, that second one, do you wake up to take a sleeping pill? How and why do you do that? Next one, how do you respond when the future seems unclear? The fourth, are you always waiting for the weekend? The fifth, what are you looking forward to? The next one, what have been your greatest teachers in the past? So those could be people and those could also be events. Try to choose three maybe, and examine each. The final one, when do you rush? And again, as always, for each of these questions, they're starting points. Think about why, think about how, think about as we do write the thoughts, the feelings, the actions, that kind of play a role in the answers to these questions. And examine them a little bit. All right, so those are the philosophical meditation questions. And now let's get some advice. Again, we're gonna start with Santa Cahier. I'll read a few quotes for us. Maybe I'll add some of my own interpretations, and hopefully we could find something useful here from Santa Cahier. So first one, the fool with all their other faults has this also. They are always getting ready to live. So I think this is a real, I mean, for me, I see this is very practical, right? This is like, when I know I don't wanna do something, I start planning to do it a lot, right? So even with something for school, I'm still a student myself. It's like, instead of just writing the essay or doing the research, I'm like, let me figure out how I'm gonna approach this. It's just wasting time, right? I know if I get started, the approach will kind of form itself, and it'll be fine. Right, we're just gonna say, don't plan, but don't get obsessed with planning. Right, we learn from doing a lot of the time. That's from Aristotle, right? We learn things by doing them. So we have to have more of an action oriented approach, right? And again, we only take action in the present. But a lot of us, myself, I've included kind of stare at what we want for the future, and then just don't do much about it. And we're gonna talk a little bit about another episode, something called Wishful Thinking, as is described by Dr. Elliott Cohen, the founder of Logic-based Therapy, which is kind of a philosophical approach to therapy. And you can't just want things to be different. You have to actually go out and do them, right? So the idea that you're ready to live implies it for me, like you're never really fully engaging with the moment, 'cause you're pausing that, or you maybe you're afraid to fully commit to things, for whatever reason. And it's this idea that we kind of look at life almost as a spectator. So you wanna fight that, right? Next go from Sanika. Have regard only to the place where you are. You have to be where you are in order to get where you wanna be anyway. And the fuller you understand, let's say, the fuller you're understanding, the more detailed you're understanding of what is, the more likely you are, I think, to move forward, let's say, effectively. Right, so to take care of where we are, really, of course, is to inhabit the moment fully. To understand it, to kind of tune into, you know, with our senses to what's going on. And I think this even works great for the idea of knowing thyself, right? You gotta know where you are right now. What are your skills? What are your weaknesses? What are your fears? Where are you confident? So having regard to those things is important. And I also think, for me, and this is actually really practical for me right now, given the nature of my work, I have to plan my semesters, right? Plan my teaching, plan my work as a student, plan other projects I'm working on, right? And I'm sure we can all relate to this, while wearing multiple hats throughout life, right? You can't predict what's gonna happen with certainty or accuracy. That'll come up again a lot in the next couple of episodes. And what I think, for me, at least, I have a tendency to lose regard for where I am, 'cause I get so into thinking about what might change, such that I almost as like, I don't take advantage of the day sometimes, 'cause I know that this day will literally two months from now be different. My schedule will be different, for example. It doesn't matter. Take advantage of the day, right? Have regard once again for where we are. That's where physically, both in time and in space. Let's go to the next one. As to what may happen in the future, we will see later on. Today, there is nothing wrong. So all these, I think, are starting to already connect, right? Don't invent something wrong. Don't invent a challenge today that doesn't exist today. Even if it might exist two months from now. We're not there. We can prepare for that, but to act like it is, to act like tomorrow's potential challenges today's challenge really robs today of its fullness and its potential. It's not honest, right? It's not useful. This one's about the past. This is epic. This is very powerful. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands. I'm gonna leave that where I'm not gonna even interpret that. That's great. Nothing is ours except time, which I think is to say how we address time, right? We can't, time is in a literal sense, not ours, right? 'Cause it's gonna march forward no matter what. We can't control it. That being said, I think what he's trying to say here is like understand that really, the consciousness you bring to the moment, which is almost to say the way you're living in the moment, right? Benefits from thinking that it's, you know, we benefit from thinking, I think, right? That the way we manage our inner disposition, the way we feel in the moment, the way we think in the moment, right? We benefit when we try to live this, I think. Right, if we really try to attach ourselves only to what is happening within ourselves, here and there, I think we benefit from that. I think that's a powerful practice, right? To acknowledge this and try to think and feel and act in ways that embody it. When one is busy and absorbed in one's work, the very absorption affords great delight. So that's that first prompt, right? That's when you're fully awake and engaged. And let's interpret work in a very general broad sense, right? Work doesn't necessarily mean like a job. It could mean whenever you're focused on a task and you're taking it seriously and you're applying yourself. This is a great one. I love this next one too. How often has the unexpected happened? How often has the expected never come to pass? When you feel yourself starting to predict, trying to control what's not in our control, I think this is a great reminder 'cause I love this one a lot. Because I'm a big predictor of things. And I'm usually incorrect, but I just haven't learned that lesson yet. For some reason I'm refusing to give up on that. But this quote is really helpful. And acknowledging the moments when we are surprised, I think is really powerful too, to once again, to live this a little bit more fully. Damn, I didn't see that coming. And almost taking like a moment to be happy about that 'cause you know what, if the world was so predictable, it'd be super boring. Right, I think there's a lot of cliché thinking around like things come to you when you're not looking for them. What if you stopped looking entirely? Right, and again, entirely in quotes, right? It makes sense to plan a little bit for the future. But everything would kind of be a pleasant surprise, to an extent. Again, at least the pleasant things would be a pleasant surprise instead of I just expected this to happen. Well, be careful with that. But we have a great quote coming up. Actually, let me see if I can find it now that connects to this, right? We have to be careful around that idea of expecting things to happen. And then as a result of that expectation, like not really valuing them. One second, I want to find a quote for us here that we're going to talk about. I was going to talk about later. Here we go, right? So this is from Pierre Hadot's philosophy, "The Way of Life." And it just pertains so nicely to what we just had a moment ago with Senator, right? Believe that each new day that dawns will be the last for you. Then each unexpected hour shall come to you as a delightful gift. Think about that. So this reminds me of my grandmother, and I may have mentioned this in a recent lecture [BLANK_AUDIO] I'm repeating myself, but one of the things she said now, she's 90 and she had a great point in the other day, she was saying, "When you wake up at my age, every day feels like a gift." And that's a really philosophical point. And I really love that. I really appreciate that she said that, right? That's exactly what we're getting here from Hado. And that's more of a stoic approach, right? We're just reading Seneca. This notion of every day might be your last. The stoics were big once again. We've talked about this on my mental mori. So the idea of delightful gift, it's a pleasurable thing. We should take pleasure in this. We should be grateful for this. Each moment being a gift, it should fill us with gratitude and that's really meaningful. It's really powerful. We are invited to become aware of the vanity of our immensely vain desires, again, desires being future driven here. At the same time as the eminence of death, the uniqueness of life and the uniqueness of the present instant. From this perspective, each instant appears as a marvelous gift which fills us with sympathy with gratitude. I mean, that's the whole kind of approach right there. That's a very kind of all-encompassing statement. To delight in this gift that we have of the moment, right? To look at it like that, even if it's challenging. You know? So the notion of looking forward to some things, right? Again, reasonable, but we want to make sure we relate to them in a healthy way, right? Which is to say, not obsessing over them such that we miss the gift of the moment. It's totally normal to look forward, but it's about how we do it. And we want to make sure we're not missing something valuable, right? So I think that was a nice kind of addition to Senica. Let's finish up with Senica then we're going to get into the epic arenas a little bit more here. On the note of looking forward, right, as a normal thing, he encourages us here. You will suffer soon enough when it arrives. Still, it's your big on that, right? So if we're part of life, we have to just relate to it. It's going to happen. So look forward, meanwhile, to better things. It's okay to look forward to good things is what he's saying here too, right? It's normal. What's not good, what the Stokes don't want us to do is to torture ourselves over things unnecessarily. So one pathway to that of course is acceptance, bad things will happen. And then kind of let's say toughening ourselves up a bit, right, by confronting these realities. The Stokes among other schools were big on sort of like practicing some forms of let's say fasting or depriving oneself of something pleasurable as a way to just kind of cultivate toughness. For example, Marcus really is famously when he was a kid, stepped on the floor when he had a bed, by his own choice to cultivate toughness. He would one exercise other Stokes among other schools of practice would be like going out in the cold without heavy clothing on so you kind of get used to dealing with the cold, right? And then there's different options to sort of toughen us up I think to get us resilient for the future. But Stoke is also saying here too, it's like you know what, why not have some positive thoughts about the future too? And think about that combination, right? If you use today to get a little bit tougher, a little more resilient, you acknowledge that things might go wrong. But then you also mix in a positive thing. It's kind of like creating a resilience and a balance that might be really helpful in grappling with an uncertain future, right? And in the future that's unclear to us. Alright, so let's go to the Epicureans a little bit here. I hope some of that Senegal was meaningful for us. And let's, we're going to be referencing here Pierre Hadot's Philosophies Away of Life, his perspective on the Epicurean School in regards to this issue of living in the moment. And the Epicureans had a different approach in the Stokes, although I think John generally we could say that in the ancient schools of philosophy, the main goal was to practice philosophy as a way of life and as a form of therapy. So there were a lot of similarities. But where the Stoics, let's say some of the key elements of their philosophy might focus on things like a more faulty acceptance of what's occurring in the universe, right? Now I wanted to change things where that's kind of Nietzsche's perspective on the Stoics or a Nietzsche, Nietzsche idea on the Stoics. The mental more we just talked about that, this idea of remembering that you're mortal, confronting your obligations, confronting the suffering, the Epicureans were more about pleasure. And pleasure to them, just a kind of a brief overview of it, was conceived of in the following way generally, right? It's a little bit cursory and I apologize, but I think this might be useful too, right? So they generally saw pleasure as having like three levels, right? The first level was the pleasures that were natural and necessary. So that was stuff like breathing, right? Literally enjoying being in a state of pleasure as a result of focusing on your breath. And that's I think really powerful when you think about a lot of other modes of, let's say, even meditation. We could use that word coming from different schools of philosophy. It's a lot of it's focusing on your breath, right? There's a reason for that. There's something pleasurable in the simple act of existing. We have to find those pleasures. I think we could also put eating natural and necessary eating healthy food and enjoying food. That's good for us. Enjoying food that tastes good, right? Really, again, if you're fortunate to have all of your senses functioning, right? That's something we have to be grateful for and try to take pleasure in. Right? So natural and necessary, that's what most of our focus should be. The things that again are natural for us. They come to us in that regard, you know, is naturally they come to us organically. And they are absolutely necessary. We want to focus on those mostly. The second level pleasures that we should focus on a little bit less than the first are those that are natural, but they are not necessary. And the third level are those that we should focus on the least. And those are the pleasures that are not natural and those that are not necessary. Right? So I think to focus a little bit on the third for a moment, that would be like fame, excessive wealth, status, right? These are the things that really aren't natural, right? They're not necessary. You don't need all this money, right? We don't. And then when you strive for things that are both natural, I'm sorry, unnatural, unnecessary, the pickerians are maybe aren't saying, okay, don't bother with those at all. But I guy, for me, I think about it a little bit in percentages too. Right? Again, thinking, feeling, acting, we want to get number one having the most focus in our day. Right? So again, a little bit of a summary there, but I hope that was helpful. And let's get into some more specific thoughts on how the pickerians wanted us to address the moment. Right? So once again, this is why for the pickerians, this is from Hadosed perspective, census people live in hope for the future. And census cannot be certain, they are consumed by fear and anxiety. According to an epicory in saying, the life of the foolish person is fearful and unpleasant. It is swept totally away into the future. Thus, a pickerian wisdom proposes a radical transformation, which must be active at each instant of life, of mankind's attitude towards time. We must, it teaches, learn how to enjoy the pleasure of the present without letting ourselves be distracted from it. If the past is unpleasant to us, we are to avoid thinking about it. And we must not think about the future. And so far as the idea of it provokes in us fears and unbridled expectations. Only thoughts about what is pleasant of pleasure, whether past or future, are to be allowed into the present moment, especially when we are trying to compensate for current suffering. That is a whole philosophy right there. Focus on the pleasant, focus on pleasures in your thinking and acting. So we're already hopefully feeling some differences here between this philosophy and stoicism. And the memory doesn't really fit into this unless you have a very unique relationship to the mental more. Right? Let me rephrase that. As I was saying that, I realized for me, the mental more actually frees me from anxiety, which I do think that feeling is pleasant in its own way. So then again, I guess I realize that everyone will agree with that. Because I've been teaching the mental more for a few years and some people respond to that and they're like, no, I don't want to deal with that. And the pickerians would be like, okay, that's cool. That's kind of what they're saying here, right? If that's unpleasant to you, and again, we're taking this small piece of a pickerianism, right, just as what we're talking about here. Think about something else, right? The book, Zorba the Greek, I may have mentioned this, talks about what Zorba is saying, the main character. You don't need to know much about the book to, I think, grapple with this small piece of it. I, he goes to one of the other characters. I live life, like I'm going to die any moment. That's the stoic. The other guy says, I live life, like I'm going to live forever. If that's a pleasant idea for you, the second guy is a little more like the pickerians. I think that imagine for that individual thought of death just brings anxiety and fear, which the pickerians like, don't do that. And again, the stoics are also saying don't do that, but they have different pathways to pursue that final aim. Or as I mentioned a few minutes ago, what the idea that in the ancient world, like philosophy was viewed as therapy for these schools specifically among others. Many thoughts about what is pleasant, of pleasure, whether past or future are to be allowed into the present moment. Keyword there is only, right? It's very interesting. So I think we can examine this too, right? Like if each day is a gift, as we talked about already, right? We make that something that's pleasant for us. And then maybe we re-valuate our approach to life a little bit and work in some more pleasure, work in some more pleasant memories versus thinking about the challenges, thinking about the obligations, right? That, again, my present those challenges. So for me, I think my natural default setting for whatever reasons is to have more of a stoic approach. And I really love my mental more. That works for me. But I've recently been examining myself and thinking like I have to focus a little more on a piquarines. I need to work into my day, you know, a couple more sort of just pleasurable things, right? So for example, I think, you know, this is just an example, right? I have an obligation to eat healthy, right? I have to take care of myself, right? Okay. Well, that doesn't mean I can't have a couple foods throughout the day that are a little less healthy, but a little more tasty. And that's obviously a very simple example, right? But I think it's emblematic of the point. If all we do is focus on our obligations, if all we do is focus on our challenges, if all we do is focus on, let's say, being disciplined and challenging ourselves, all those things are useful as, even as things to focus on. But even those can't be too obsessive, right? Cicero himself, the stoic said, don't always be a stoic. So maybe again, maybe you're someone who needs a little more stoicism in your life, maybe you're someone who needs a little more epicorineism in your life. So we know ourselves first and hopefully some of this is useful. And again, these pleasures ground us in the moment. When you're really eating, this is like everyone says is wrong. When you're eating with a bunch of people, everyone stops talking, it's because the food is good. You're really focusing on the moment. So pleasures can ground us in the moment, right? So we limit our desires. And instead, we focus on what pleasures we can make right now. And maybe it's a memory of a pleasurable moment in the past, or maybe it's a vision of a pleasant future. That's a great exercise, too, when you're like walking to your car or to the subway, whatever, take a minute and make a narrative for your future. That's pleasant. That's pleasurable. So the Koreans are encouraging us to do here. Whereas the stoics might say a little more, you know, focus on how things might go wrong in the future or focus on some of the inevitable difficulties of the future. So you're not surprised by them and you're ready to deal with them. Pickereens have a slightly different approach. We likely need some of both. And another of Pickereens saying here, I think is very good for us to think about. Once again, sticking with Hadoo, we are only born once. Twice is not allowed. And it is necessary that we shall be no more for all eternity. And yet you, who are not master of tomorrow, you keep on putting off your joy. Yeah, life is vainly consumed in these delays. And each of us dies without ever having known peace. Again, if we do that, and we see here the emphasis for the Pickereens is on joy. So how is your day joyful? How can we ground ourselves on a regular basis in the moment joyfully? Right? We want to maybe cultivate some habits around this. IE cheese every day now. It's kind of just an example that came to me. I'm making halloumi every day. I'm going to Queens at least once every two weeks and I'm loading up on this cheese and I'm making it on a regular basis. And that's my kind of like, you know, it's healthy enough, ish, but it tastes really good. And I look forward to that day. If we've been having a rough day, I think to myself, I'm going to take 10 minutes to cook. I'm going to put on some music. Nothing else is going to exist to me in those 10 minutes when I'm cooking, then when I'm eating. And then that's it. That's sort of how I've been carving in some, let's say, a Pickerean joy in my day. This is also a bad example, but I'm adding milk to my coffee now because it just tastes better. Coffee, in my opinion, should no longer just be about waking up. I have an unhealthy relationship to coffee as it is. I'm drinking an unsafe amount of coffee on a regular basis. But gotta add a little milk now. It's almond milk. Enjoy life. I'm just hungry and thirsty right now and that's what's happening. But yeah, for the Pickereans, right, work in some joy. See that once again, that joy is happening in the moment. We had some great ideas here, I think, about getting rid of excessive thoughts of the future, especially negative ones, working in some positive ones. And let's try to use this Pickerean pathway in addition to what Senegal offered us, right? So these pathways as ways to get fully awake and engaged, as ways to have positive images of the future and/or fewer thoughts of the future. Let's sit a little bit with our past, see what we can learn from it, right? With that, you know, with that middle question or one of the questions in the middle that we had for the meditations. And let's not be troubled by what we make for ourselves, right, which is to say the thoughts that we perpetuate habitually, the feelings we perpetuate habitually and the actions we've habituated. Let's have those be positive. And again, maybe add a little bit of joy from the Pickerean perspective into your life, into your day lives from this discussion. So hope this was helpful. We have more episodes to come on this and more lectures to come. And thank you for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Hello, everybody. How you doing? Hope all as well. Today we're going to be discussing living in the moment a little bit more. And we're going to be taking some ideas from Dr. Elliot Cohen, the founder of Logic-Based Therapy, which is basically using philosophy as a mode of therapy, using logic to create arguments, to analyze our thinking, feeling and acting, to eventually basically create healthier ways of thinking, feeling and acting, right? So we're going to have a little bit of an overview on some of his ideas today. I think this will be a useful conversation for us, especially those of us who might be wanting to have a healthier relationship to how we look at the future, right? So as you've been talking about with these episodes, these lectures, when we're discussing living in the moment, it's also a discussion of, of course, how we relate to the past and the future. So today, I think we're going to see really good advice from him. So I'm going to jump right in, right? So in his book, The New Rational Therapy, which I recommend, he tells us the following, right? He's talking about prediction rules, give us instructions for inferring things about the future on the basis of what you know about the past, right? So this kind of rule can be rational. And if it is rational, it yields foresight. And foresight is the ability to assess the probability of whether the future will resemble the past, right? Whether uniformities you have observed in the past provide good reason for thinking they will continue in the future, right? So this rule, of course, addresses one of the most common and inevitable sources of anxiety for human beings, which is, as we've been talking a lot about, confronting the unknown. So we want to get good at this, right? We want to be able to have healthy prediction rules such that our understanding of the future isn't exaggerated, right? Or let's say isn't excessive or deficient in some regard. So balance is going to be key here. So there's two kind of prediction rules, two types that we want to avoid, right? And this is right from Cohen. So I'm responding to the unexpected dangers that, quote, lurk in the future, again, the unknown. Some fatalistically perceive their prospects for the future. While others wishfully seek consolation, though an overly optimistic outlook. So we have on one extreme, right? People who fatalistically perceive their prospects. So that's, you know, an overly negative perception. Then on the other extreme, there are people who have too much of an optimistic approach, right? They're wishful thinkers. So we're going to define both of these things, right? So let's start off with wishful thinking. Wishful thinking for Cohen is defining the following way. Even though something has consistently gone wrong in the past, things will be different in the future. And with this, he kind of adds to this, right? He's like, you're ignoring the past. That's a problem. So you're blinding yourself to the past. Again, you're not learning from it. You're not cultivating a healthy awareness of it. And then you're telling yourself that things will be different in the future, even though nothing has really changed, right? You can wish all you want, but if you're not actually going to try to take control of what you can't control and make a change, and you're just imagining the future is going to be better, that's naive optimism, right? He tells us, quote, news flash. If you don't do anything in the present to change your situation in the future, then all the wishing in the world won't help to make things different. And of course, as we've been saying, right, even in the present moment, and as we look at our past, I'm sure there are a lot of different influences, a lot of different external and internal reasons why things happen. Of course, but for the wishful thinkers out there, right, for those of us again, who might ignore things in the past, who might even ignore patterns in the past, we have to make sure that we're avoiding that extreme. If you don't, and this will go in the ass to this, right? If you don't make any relevant changes for the future, then other things being equal, which they may or may not be, which is to say external circumstances may not even be the same, it's reasonable to expect the past to repeat itself. Now, this does not mean that the past must repeat itself. Okay, and that's, go, that gets into a conversation about the other type of fallacy we want to avoid, which is fatalistic thinking. And he breaks it down, I think, really nicely here with three related kinds of fatalistic rules that people may might be using to make predictions, right? So the first one he talks about is Murphy's Law, which is simply if something can go wrong, then it will. The next is magnifying risks. If there's any chance of something going wrong, then it probably will. The third one is insisting on the past. If anything has gone wrong in the past, then it must, as a matter of lawful necessity, continue to do so in the future. And there's nothing whatsoever you can do about it. So these are really interesting laws in opposition to the wishful thinking description we just had a moment ago, right? Okay, this is where anxiety comes from. Just because it's possible that a micro wrong, it will go wrong. Right? There's something that's kind of cosmic about this. The universe is operating this way. It just is what it is. So once again, this is extreme. So one extreme, it'll be different. It'll be better. I don't have to do anything. The other extreme does nothing I can do. It's going to be bad. We want to avoid both of these things, right? So Cohen is really big on Aristotle. One of his other books that I recommend reading that's interesting is what would Aristotle do, right? Aristotle's huge on balance. Virtue exists in the mean, in the balance, in the middle for Aristotle. So we're seeing here, we're kind of laying out some thinking that's clearly based on imbalances. So as we do with everything, right, try to locate yourself within this conversation. Do you think in a Murphy's law way, do you think in a magnifying risk way, do you insist on the past? Or are you maybe more of a wishful thinker? And again, get into details, the quality of the thoughts, the quantity and frequency of those thoughts, also the context, right? And maybe, you know, in some ways, maybe you're a wishful thinker. Other contexts, you're practicing Murphy's law quite often. Right? So we don't want either of these things to prevent us from making positive changes in our lives. And we also, of course, don't want to use these things as ways of creating really negative inner dispositions, right, of anxiety and stress. So that's kind of the scene we set up here, right? We have two extremes in regards to how we might view the future that we want to avoid. All right, so one of the great parts about Cohen's work is that he provides the sort of, let's say, the diagnosis with you might be practicing Murphy's law, you might be practicing wishful thinking. Then through philosophy, he provides anodotes. Right? So I'm going to read these anodotes to you. I'll provide a little bit of elaboration. And hopefully some of these are useful. I'll also get a little bit into the into the philosophies as well. Right? So the first anodote I'd like to share with you is the following. Give me one second. All right, this is a good one. Be prepared to accept some risk in making your life choices. But before jumping to conclusions about increased risks, consider first the evidence to account for them. That's a lot in this one suggestion to unpack, right? So when we accept risk, we realize I think to an extent that not everything is within our control. Even we could argue again, really interestingly on this, right? To what extent our own thoughts, feelings and actions might be in our control. But nonetheless, when we're saying we're accepting risk, we have to, you know, for me, that kind of means we have to accept imperfection. We have to accept that we might spend time energy resources and things won't go our way. We want to be scientific about this though. We don't want to be random. We want to collect evidence as objectively and as truthfully as possible, such that when we take chances, right, we're not embarking on risk that don't make any sense. But instead we're embarking on risks that are in the correct direction. And we understand them in ways that are actually as close to the objective truth as possible. Whereas you want to stick to the evidence. It's another large part of what it means to, you know, avoid all these fallacies. Next anecdote. In facing situations involving risk to suffer others, seek the golden mean with regard to feelings of fear and confidence. So this is our as I said a moment ago, right? We have to acknowledge that, you know, it's kind of normal to be afraid of uncertainties. That being said, we can, we can cultivate comfort and confidence by, as we're saying here, go for the golden mean. So courage said Aristotle is a mean or a balance with regard to feelings of fear and confidence. So we need fear to be confident. Right? It's about balancing out about not succumbing to the fear, taking action once again based on evidence that we've cultivated through questioning, right? Kind of taking a secratic, let's say, platonic approach to the evidence, right? Or gathering the evidence, asking questions of ourselves, asking questions of the world, such that we can then get informed and then take the correct action, the face of fear, which is to say the balanced action. We have to learn how to rationally control our fears of the future to take actions in the moment to then encourage the future we want. So again, we're not frozen in the idea that the future is going to repeat itself and it's going to be bad or if something is going to, if something might be bad, it will be. And then we're also not doing nothing and then practicing wishful thinking either. Right? And that of course requires an Aristotelian understanding of courage. As Aristotle says, right? The person then who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive in the right way and from the right time and who feels confidence under the corresponding conditions is brave. For the brave person feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule of reason directs. So back to my other idea, I have context, right of quality of quantity. It's not about not feeling fear, it's not about having an entirely bad or entirely optimistic view of the future. It's about doing all of those things under the guide of a balanced rational mode of thinking. So the trick this is from Cohen is to be neither over nor under confident and neither too afraid cowardly or not afraid enough. Rache, as I mentioned, risk assessment should take account of the risk factors involved in the activity in question. To be fearless in the face of grave danger is as foolish as is to be cowardly or framed by small risks. Okay? As Aristotle wisely stated, people who are ignorant of the danger also appear brave. But those who have been deceived about the facts fly if they know or suspect that these are different from what they supposed. Right? So we have to again apply that rational thinking skill. So that we're actually examining our future prospects. Honestly, and then we face that uncertainty or that pessimism or that optimism in a balanced manner. Right? And Cohen shares another point here too, which connects to these quite nicely, right? Or the two anecdotes already. Ignorance is often at the root of under confidence and over confidence in managing risks. So we apply that secratic platonic questioning to gather the evidence. We accept the risk. Then we face that with a risk of attaining courage. Right? And that's also an antidote because Aristotle's so action oriented encourages what is, you know, that's the fuel for action. That's an antidote really to wishful thinking as well. Let's go on to another antidote. If you're spinning in a self-destructive vicious cycle, get pessimistic about your future. Expose the blind craving for security that keeps your life in limbo. Then do what you can to increase the probability of a brighter future. So this is about avoiding wishful thinking. Because wishful thinking might encourage us to think that we don't need to make any changes. Right? And not delete the stagnation. If something's repeatedly going wrong, right? Under certain conditions, this is saying we have to get pessimistic, we're like telling ourselves look, this is going to continue to happen. Let me try to change these conditions, changing the circumstances and relevant respects to the best of our ability, focusing what we can't control is how we might want to think about changing the future. Okay? As a co-incessor, this is a great idea, very philosophical. Many people persist in habits that repeatedly lead to undesirable results. So maybe that's ourselves, we start with questioning. Maybe it's others, we also start with questioning. Maybe we want to guide someone else to see that their habits are not serving them. We got to start with questions. John Stuart Mill discussed this really nicely. So does Aristotle, the idea that habits and so does Camelman away and among others, of course, right? Habits put us to sleep sometimes. It's hard to see our habits. At times, habits create a sense of comfort. It's almost easier to be comfortable and unhappy than it is to be uncomfortable to make the change that become happier and because you know fill in the blank and we mean happiness can be replaced a lot of different things as well, right? Even if we know something isn't good for us, if it's a habit, it becomes difficult to change. So we have to get pessimistic maybe. Cohen's offering this, I think it's a really interesting concept. Maybe it's not enough, right? Maybe we have to get a little pessimistic with ourselves to encourage good actions on a daily basis to make a better future. And we can even seek to any extent and find pleasure in that pessimism if we respond to it correctly. Okay? It might always seem like things are going to be different this time than they're not. I mean, get in the cycle. We have to open our eyes and see if we're being truthful with ourselves. Right? We have to wake up and make sure we're collecting the correct evidence. And then again, I think that idea of a pessimistic understanding the future, I, that motivates the hell out of me and gets me busy on a daily basis, right? I don't, again, for example, with my career. I don't know what's going to be available for a full-time position. So if I'm not good at this and I'm not writing and I'm not trying to work at different institutions and trying to, you know, really serve my students well and offer things that are useful, I mean, that's a real pessimistic kind of motivational moment, not knowing whether or not there's going to even be anything available. So I can either sit on that and say, oh, no, something's available. It's fine. I don't have to really think about this too much and take action on it. Or I can get a little bit pessimistic like, no, this requires, or this is unknown, this might be negative. It requires action now. And then when I start taking action, I feel good. Why? Because I'm taking action competently. I'm taking action in a way that's single-minded. I'm focused on a task. So I'm not practicing Murphy's Law. I'm like, okay, well, I'm definitely not going to get something. But I'm collecting the evidence. There aren't that many jobs to begin with. I don't want to, you know, go far away at all. So that little bit of pessimism gets me taking action the moment. And that action is actually leading me to some pretty positive feelings. So I'm doing what I can to increase the probability of a brighter future as per the antidote. Right? So how do we maybe alter a self-destructive pattern? Maybe we need this type of encouragement. So we want to use pessimism as a means for being ready to participate in constructive actions, to cultivate new habits, to turn off the blind optimism. Right? No matter what life's thrown at us, right? We can't sort of anchor ourselves in wishful thinking. We have to work on our willpower, right? And maybe start moving in new ways, thinking in new ways, and hopefully feeling in new ways. So again, we're avoiding the extremes. And we're thinking through that secratic lens of questioning. To start off with, right? Gather information, to gather knowledge, to really learn, again, from the past, to learn about ourselves in the present, such that we can move forward into the future as positively as possible. Right? We can and should work to fight Murphy's Law type thinking by working in the moment to increase their probability for future prosperity. It's really important. And also, we are tied as maybe wanting a little pessimistic, so we're not getting into wishful thinking, which is to say kind of, in a sense, hoping blindly. So hope is helpful. Hope some of these ideas might have resonated, and I will talk to you soon. Thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. How you doing? Hope all as well. This one I think will be pretty short. I want to share with you a quick poem and then a little bit from a picked atiss on living in the moment. And let's get into the poem right away. I think this is an interesting one. So a few lines here from Goeth's Rule of Life. Would you model for yourself a pleasant life? Worry not about the past. Let not anger get the upper hand. Rejoice in the present without ceasing. Hate no person. The future abandoned it to God. And I'm going to let you interpret that. I think that's a nice few lines. The last line I think of, especially stands out to me. And again, as we always do, I think about how could life be different if I were to adopt some of the ideas in those few lines. Right? So the next piece I want to share with all of you is a piece from a picked atiss is the art of living, which is a great book. We have a lot of it. If you're in my classroom, saying to this, we have a lot of this featured in our bibliotherapy. I do recommend taking a look at the whole book. It's great. And this section is called Care Take This Moment. And he tells us, Care Take This Moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit the evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live, to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now. You are not some disinterested bystander. Participate, exert yourself. Respect your partnership with Providence. Ask yourself often, how may I perform this particular deed such that it would be consistent with and acceptable for the divine will. He the answer and get to work. When your doors are shut and your room is dark, you are not alone. The will of nature is within you, as your natural genius is within. Listen to the importunities. Follow its directives. As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life. No great thing is created suddenly. There must be time. Give your best and always be kind. So this is like a real blueprint here, to leading a good life, right? Once again, as we've been talking about, of course, last year episodes, very much center on the notion that we need to take care of what's in front of us now. The Stoics were big on the idea that we should have. This is like a direct quote. This idea, things ready at hand. Monterey is basically rules to dictate the ways that we live. We'll return to this probably next week when we get into our conversation about regular or daily philosophical practices. But you want to have phrases ready to go. Like phrases ready for you to kind of meet the world and greet the world with, right? So for me, I immediately get a mantra out of this, right? I'll even just think of two words. I'll just think this task. When I'm doing something and I feel myself getting distracted, I'll think like, no, this task, this moment, right? That idea of immersing ourselves in a particular, right, is to say being awake to what's occurring. You can't do a job to the best of your ability. You can't do a task if you're distracted, right? If you're multitasking, you really can't, right? To really live life, the moment requires your attention. And we can train that and we can get good at it. We can get better at it day in, day out. Right? Putting aside our distractions, right? And really getting into whatever it is we're actually doing. We want to get good at this, right? On the other side of this, I think, I think I picked it to what encourages us to see that there's more meaning, there's more happiness, there's more creation, right? Of ourselves and of other things for the world and with the world, right? To really live, we have to exert ourselves. You're not really exerting yourself if you're not focused. You're not really participating really if you're not focused. Right even, you know, I think a couple episodes ago I suggested, you know, even if you listen to this when you're driving. Obviously, focus on driving. I'm not giving advice to not care about driving. But try to take advantage of these episodes, these lectures, hopefully, you know, in a way where it's like you can focus on them a little bit. You can give them your attention, right? They might, you might get a little more out of it is what he's saying here, right? To care, take this moment, that's a skill in and of itself, right? To end this with give your best and always be kind, I think, you know, kindness is a virtue we want to, you know, embody, of course, and giving our best, right? Like when do you give your best? There's a great question. When do you consciously tell yourself I'm really going to give my all here? And that's again, not just with work, that's also with leisure, right? Because if we get to a point two where it's like we're never really working and we're never really relaxing, I confront that a lot, right? It's almost like I just a constant low level buzz, right? Whereas like if I were to just really give my time effectively, which sometimes I would say pretty often I do, I'm able to kind of flip it like it's a switch, right? Kind of a simple example, but this Sunday I didn't do this very well. This Sunday instead of, okay, no one, I'm really going to focus for like two to three hours intensely and then relax the rest of the day. I was kind of in and out all day, like focusing but not really like kind of texting or, you know, bouncing between tasks minute to minute. Instead of just being like, you know what, no, for the next two hours I'm going to do these three things and that's the only thing I'm doing. I don't really take care of my moments on Sunday. I let myself get distracted. I let myself not really, you know, focus on the tasks themselves as intensely as I should have. I didn't give my best. I'm focusing on giving our best requires immersing ourselves as he's saying here. Okay, and then I did quit the evagence, that's what I was doing. I was evading my actual responsibilities, right? I was evading the work I had to do for school, and I was reading while I was texting or I was checking emails every other page. It wasn't, it was evasive. It was entirely evasive, right? And needless trouble, I gave myself needless trouble because I started working at 10, I kind of drifted throughout the day, then by four I was disappointed in myself. I was like, "Ah, I could have done this better today." And I have more work to do now, right? So, didn't go well. I heed the answer and get to work. That's great. How am I going to perform this deed such that it would be consistent with and acceptable to the divine will? Maybe you're a person of faith, and that'll really work for you. Maybe you're not a person of faith. You want to think about just goodness, right? Well, maybe you have a conception of yourself, like the higher, let's say the more virtuous version of yourself, the higher achievements you want to move towards, right? The greater achievements, whatever, right? Well, was today acceptable? Did today get you closer to those things or not? And again, if you're never really taking care of it, you're never really giving it your attention, which is a really huge idea for the next set of lectures too. This idea of prosa-k, we're going to talk about this, right? It's this idea of vigilance over the self in the pursuit of self-mastery. Well, that takes time and effort, right? And in this context too, in a philosophical context, you know, it's about mastering ourselves in regards to our virtues. So our patience, our courage, all things we can work on, right? This is a pathway to that, to take care of this moment. So we take care of the moment to work on those things, themselves, as themselves. And we also take care of this moment when we're acting in the world and acting other ways, such that we are virtuous. And then once again, we're answering to the best in us. And maybe for people of faith, we're answering to what a higher power asks of us. To ask ourselves, right, when do we give our best? How could we do that more effectively? When do we really take care of the task in front of us? When do we ignore the tasks in front of us? How could we change that? And what might that tell us, right, about the task that we ignore, and our relationship to that? Maybe we shouldn't be doing them. I would like to end this with another brief, kind of poetic break here, with another piece from Pierre Hadot's presentation of Goeth. Give me one second here. "Hour by hour, life is kindly offered us. We have learned but little from yesterday of tomorrow all knowledge is forbidden. And if I ever feared the coming evening, the setting sun still saw what brought me joy. Do like me then, with joyful wisdom, look the instant in the eye. Do not delay, hurry, run to greet it, lively and benevolent. Be it for action, for joy, or for love. Wherever you may be, be like a child, holy and always, then you will be the all and invincible." The past, this is more, this is really great, I like these lines. The past has gained steadfastness. The present is alive beforehand. The instant is eternity. Am I reading this, like these kind of like in a dramatic voice? I feel like I'm getting a little bit, a little like toothy actual right now. Let's punctuate it there. And I hope some of these poetic additions might be useful for us. Let me know if they were. If you like these kind of poems, I might include some more poetry. And if you're interested in poetry, there's an episode of the podcast where I read some roomy. And I'm really a big fan of roomy's poetry. So if you're into poetry, roomy's got some great poetry. So hope is helpful. And why bother with art? One second here. Why bother with poetry? I think in our class, I've talked about paintings as well. That's a great way to live in the moment. To have a real experience with a song or a poem or a work of art, that really brings you into the moment, I think, right? That aesthetic experience. Like you're almost in awe of, it could also be something, you know, with nature too, right? So try to populate your life too. Maybe a little bit of poetry, a little bit of art. Go out, see something in nature, right? Really engage with the song you're listening to. Right? Care, take that moment. Care, take that experience. And exert yourself in it, right? Apply yourself to it. On it there. Hope it's helpful. Hello, everybody. How you doing? Hope all as well. Today we're sticking with on living in the moment. And I want to present you with a brief selection from a pictotist, his famous piece, The Incaridion. This is number 15. So Incaridion, rough translation pretty much means the manual, like the manual for living, right? So we're keeping in mind a pictotist did not write anything down. He was a teacher. So what we have sort of remaining from his work, more or less comes from the notes kept by his students. So I think for me, again, I'm going to read the section. We're going to interpret it. I think it really applies to living in the moment. And not only that, but I think it also starts to elaborate on like the virtues that come with living more in the moment. So I think we'll get a lot out of this brief section. So I'll start here. He tells us, remember that you must behave in life as at a dinner party. Is anything brought around you? Put out your hand and take your share with moderation. Does the past buy you? Don't stop it. Is it not yet come? Don't stretch your desire towards it. But wait till it reaches you. Do this with regard to children, to a wife, to public posts, to riches, and you will eventually be a worthy partner of the Feast of the Gods. And if you don't even take the things which are said before you, but are able to even to reject them, then you will not only be a partner at the Feast of the Gods, but also of their empire. For by doing this, theogenes, Heroclitus, and others like them, deservedly became and recalled divine. So right off the bat for me, I think about this in the context of going out to eat, as he's saying here, dinner party, I kind of phrase it differently. I think going out to eat with friends and family. People you actually like, right? If you were going out, you're excited to go to this restaurant. You know what you want. You've been waiting all day to eat. You have the entree in mind. And you're just ready to go. And you get there, everybody wants to order appetizers and drinks, and kind of take their time to get to the entree. Again, you care about these people. You like these people. You don't yell at them. Right? You go along. You go along. You go with the flow. Right? You accept what is. You're like, okay, I can wait for the steak or whatever I want to get. And here's also, and we're going to start now getting into the virtues here, right? And these questions. You get the appetizer. You don't obviously load up on the appetizer. You take in moderation. Right? You also don't eat none of the appetizer, because then you're going to be ridiculously starving. Right? So either way, when your real entree hits the plate, or I'm sorry, the real entree hits the table, right? If you ate too much, you're not going to eat enough of the entree. You're not going to enjoy it. And if you ate too little of the appetizer, you're going to be so starving that you just inhale it. You get so fast that you barely even take the time to enjoy it. Right? So moderation is key here. Okay? So let's stick with this a little bit more of this vision of going out to eat. Right? I like the idea as well of, you know, when you're really hungry and you're staring at the kitchen door. You're ignoring everything that's going on around you. You're ignoring your friends. You're missing the appetizer. You're not fully engaging with what's going on in the table. Right? You're missing the conversation. You're just staring at the door. And then a lot of times in life, we've all experienced this. It's absolutely horrible. You want your food to come, you think you see what is your food, and then just the waiter walks right by you, right? And they're disappointed. So what are you saying is that not yet come, don't stretch your desire towards it, stop looking at the kitchen door. And just wait. So then we have the virtue, initially of moderation, balance, and we have the virtue of patience. Right? And then we have the idea too. And I think this is maybe the most sort of interesting one. Then even when your food gets there, can you abstain from it? Such that the food doesn't control you, but you control your relationship to the hunger. Right? So in this brief paragraph, two, this is kind of a tertiary point maybe, but we'll get back to living on the moment or in the moment in a second. Right? But why bother with fasting? Fasting is a spiritual exercise. It's profoundly philosophical and spiritual. Right? So when you think about a lot of well-known religions, there's some type of fasting practice. There's a real spiritual reason for that. Right? So he's saying here, you go to eat your hungry, right? Control yourself. Take your moderation. Don't overeat, don't under eat the appetizer, even though it's not what you really want. Why? Because it actually is setting you up for the thing you do want. Okay? Whatever is yours, and this is maybe an idea we can disagree with, an idea we can disagree with both the Stoics and. We could even extrapolate a little bit here, right? If you're someone who believes in fate or destiny, or that, you know, the idea that there's a reason for everything, right? Well, this is very much in line with that philosophy. What comes to you is yours. And we could even argue for example, maybe you agree with that idea, right? And maybe you don't. Either way, things happen. How should we cultivate the healthiest relationship with these things? Reminds me of the Arabic proverb, right? The stone that cannot be moved should be kissed. That's a great idea. So what is unchangeable? Well, we cannot alter, what we cannot get back, we cannot control, we have to learn how to cultivate some type of healthy relationship to it, right? So this little scene here, of course, is a metaphor for life. I think a really, really simple analogy here would be going to school, right? Going to college. You could miss four years if all you want to do is graduate. And by that I mean, you could miss a lot of what's in front of you. You could miss a lot of the appetizer. Let's say the dessert is the graduation, because that is a great achievement, 100%. That is something to move towards, 100%. But if all you're doing is staring at that graduation, staring at the kitchen door, you're not going to hear what the person next to you is saying. Right, if you don't engage with the appetizer, which is to say, again, food is life-giving, right? That's why I went so and feeds you when you go over to somebody's house, there's like, there's a specialness there. Right, they're literally telling you, in a sense, I want you to live here. We all know food sustains us, right? So it's a metaphor for just the moment. The moment, once again, is the only place where we can really get fulfillment, because the future, as we said, is unpredictable. It's not here, and the past is no longer ours. It's over. So the only time in life we can get that fulfillment is the now. But if we're training ourselves to stare at the kitchen door and to want what is absent, that's future or past, right? We're not fully engaging in the moment. So I think this is a great metaphor, right? Also to add to this, right? Let's say you really want the entree, and the waiter comes with the appetizer. You really shouldn't, and I hope nobody does this, of course, yell at the waiter. The waiter brings what they bring. That's the universe. What happens happens. It's outside of our control, a lot of it, right? So again, another great aspect of that metaphor. Are you yelling at the universe? And even in a sense, it's like, I'll be happy when, or life will be better when, and then if the next thing is an external, right? Or if it's, let's say, to put it a little bit better, if the following thing involves things that are out of your control, or a thing that is out of your control, you're really setting yourself up for kind of an emptiness in life. And again, I love how this metaphor talks about, the idea of an empty stomach, to an extent, right? That stomach is a metaphor once again, for our soul, our sense of fulfillment in life, when one way of seeing it again is our udimonia, as we've discussed. We can instead, in the face of this metaphor, or with this metaphor, we could say, let me take what's in front of me, and let me give me life. Let me not take too much, let me not let me not take too little. And I certainly don't want to miss what's in front of me, even if it's not exactly what I want. Maybe you do just want to graduate, but, you know, part of this philosophy that I picked at Tess's is, is that it is what it is. So we have to find a way to work within that, right? So to stretch your desire towards something that you want, that's projecting to the future. Just wait, and don't just wait, right? Let the thing find you working, and that's working both on our inner disposition. We talked about this last episode, or maybe two episodes ago, or lectures ago, whatever, with Marcus, it really is, right? This is enough for you. Marcus will look at the appetizer, go, this is enough, right, this moment is enough for me. Okay, that waiting doesn't mean doing nothing, it means working with what's in front of us. And when you start listing these things, children, wife, public posts, riches, these are all things we strive for commonly, right? And again, we have to train ourselves to not have this gaze constantly diverted to the future, constantly diverted to what is absent, because we will never feel fulfilled, or against it with a metaphor, we will never have our stomachs full. And I think we could all think of times in our lives we've done this, maybe we have a habit of doing this, maybe we know people, right, who do this, but it really goes against what we're talking about the last few lectures, which is learning instead to accept and appreciate and truly engage with what's in front of us right now. That's the appetizer. And then again, hopefully it is eventually the entree. But no matter what, guess what, if you've trained yourself through drinks and through the appetizer to only look at that kitchen door, now you have a habit. So the entree comes, thinking, "Waiting for you, have it, you eat it," then guess what, maybe you're looking at the kitchen door again, because you haven't sat down and cultivated the capacity to feel once again, like Marcus would say, that this is enough. You can train yourself to feel like, you can train yourself to make yourself feel like nothing's ever enough. And that's no way to be, but it's very common. It's a very common pathology. And I think we even encourage it, right? I was really grappling with this, I was talking to a friend my other day. It's like, we think that that's virtuous to always want more. Wait a minute. Let's get rid of the word always, first of all, that's not being driven, that's being excessive. You can be driven and still know how to be satisfied. You don't want to suffer from chronic dissatisfaction. That's not healthy motivation. But we really, I think, have a tendency culturally to misconstrued that, always have to be hustling. Wait a minute. A part of your hustle should be appreciating what is, not only striving for what is not, because our inner dispositions actually do matter, the how you do things actually does matter. And this is gonna benefit you, and then I think also to help you just be calmer, and as a result of that, it'll help you be with others in a way that's more meaningful. Once again, more, let's say, you'll have the capacity to actually be with people. It's like, what are we doing next? Well, wait a minute. Right now we're here. Right, be here. That's a really important skill. I love how it picked it to just framing it, right? And again, let's not mistake, the vert, let's not mistake chronic dissatisfaction. Let's not mistake it for being a virtue. He's given us other virtues too that are really important, patience, balance. Right, and again, the idea also too of the fasting, of the note, that's discipline. That's also a great virtue. And in addition to that, this was also about gratitude. If you practice fasting, a part of that is to cultivate gratitude, right? And a number of other religious practices involve praying before you eat. So the food's in front of you, and you're not just gonna eat it right away. You're gonna stop for a little bit. And many prayers, of course, revolve around cultivating gratitude consciously. That's, there's, you know, there's, there are reasons for that. Don't just dive in, take a second. Right, it's not always about what's next. In addition to that, no matter what, right? And I'm not saying don't be driven. I think that's important too. But ultimately, to get where you wanna go, you have to be where you are first. And you should know where you are. In detail, a lot of us are moving forward with this, you know, really goal oriented and we're blind, it's not helpful. So instead, again, take time. See what's in front of you. Right? And also like, I think when he's talking about the idea of feasting with the gods, right? It's just an ocean that you can transcend yourself. You can transcend and move beyond and control your desire. You can control your, let's say, tendency to be excessive or deficient. And in so doing, you kind of move beyond yourself. There's something, you know, he's saying the word divine here. I think there's a nice element of, let's say, you're pursuing something that's beyond your current self. I think that that's ascension, that's moving up, which makes me think of kind of a divine element, maybe, right? And as long as we're pursuing virtue, of course, that's really, so I'm sure you consider. Right, to say also to the world, to an extent, like, look, everyone's engaging in this, but I don't think it's the right thing, to be able to examine these things and to not be pushed and pulled by the desire to fit in or the desires again, that might even just sort of emanate from ourselves, but instead to be moderate, to be patient, or to appreciate what's in front of us. And wait for things to reach us, versus torturing ourselves once again, as a result of their absence. So I hope his metaphor is useful. And think about this, right? I tried to paint the scene a little bit, going out to eat, like, really think about that. Are you screaming at waiters? Hopefully not literally at all, and also hopefully not philosophically. Right, what in your life? Again, it's good to have goals, but it's also not good to focus on them too much. Right, it's about the systems we put in place on a daily basis, and those will be served by the virtues that Epictetus is mentioning here, right? Discipline, balance, and patience. All of those things are really helpful to lead a healthy day to day life, and the future to a larger extent is now, right? No matter what, you're, you're keep moving through time, your future is just constantly occurring, right? It's constantly, again, as we said, the past, the present and future, from one of the stoic conceptions, the present is so just, you know, it's divisible to infinity, right? So it's constantly, we're always bumping up against past, present, future, it's perpetual, right? So what we're doing in the moment is gonna bring us forward anyway. So to take that seriously, again, to not torture ourselves by staring at the kitchen door and by yelling at waiters and by ignoring what's in front of us, we might be able to lead a healthier life. So I hope this metaphor, again, kind of highlights some living on the moment points and some others as well. I'll talk to you soon.