On our "Virtual Route 66" WIth Mid-Month #RandomThoughts

 Please enjoy the following #RandomThoughts for the Month:

He's been doing it for decades. It’s helped him make it to 88—88 years in a world that tried to break him, that discriminated against him, that made him an orphan, that threw every obstacle it could in his way. But here he is, every morning, putting his two feet on the ground next to the bed and saying: “Okay, George, you have two options today, and only two. You can be happy, or you can be very happy.” ​As George Raveling elaborates in his awesome new book What You’re Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports, he “starts with this simple but powerful choice every morning” because “it’s a reminder to myself that I have the power to set the tone for my day, to choose the attitude and mindset that I’ll bring to whatever challenges come my way.” It’s a simple choice, but not easy. There’s a very good chance you’ll come across people who are impossibly frustrating—just as Marcus Aurelius warned us about 2,000 years ago. The people you’ll deal with today, he reminds himself in Meditations, will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. You might face criticism, warranted or not, from people who just don’t get it. There will be delays and disruptions, frustrating inconveniences. People will let you down. Situations will bother you. Life will be unfair. But even if everything that could possibly go wrong does, even if circumstances seem impossibly dark, you have to fight against the instinct to give up control over how these events affect your mood. “You can bind up my leg,” Epictetus would say—indeed, his leg really had been bound and broken—“but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.” No one and nothing can steal away the control you have over your happiness and mood. We start the day with our most important decision—the choice to be in a good mood. The choice to be happy. George makes that decision every morning. So can you.  The world can break you down. Certainly, it can break down your illusions. You get tired. You get cynical. You despair. It’s in these moments, you wonder why you ought to bother to carry on. Seneca asked himself this as he was trapped in desolate exile. Marcus Aurelius asked himself this after burying another one of his children. Epictetus must have asked himself this nearly every morning of the first thirty years of his life, which he spent as a slave. What do we draw on in these crises of faith? Fortitude, sure. Stoicism is all about that. But what about finding something encouraging in the ordinary beauty of the world around you? It is this that Marcus Aurelius is doing in Meditations, where he marvels at the way bread breaks open in the oven, the way an olive ripens and falls to the ground, the flecks of foam on a boar’s mouth. In the midst of ugliness, in the midst of evil, in the midst of despair, these bright spots are always there. As we said a while back, Seneca spent a lot of time bemoaning Corsica, where he was exiled, totally missing the beauty and grandeur that drew 3 million tourists to the island just last year! We’ve talked about how as terrible and deprived as Epictetus’ life was, the magnificence of golden hour was always in his reach. So too, apparently, were the ideas from the Stoics, which made their way to him and brightened his life. Good exists everywhere—we need only look for it. Beauty surrounds us, waiting to be noticed. And for every reason to despair, there are countless moments of wonder ready to reveal themselves to those who keep their eyes—and their hearts—open.