A Missing Month and the Comfort of Philosophy

I abandoned the post here at 6 Generations as summer heated up, environmentally and politically, and as I became engrossed with family matters: visits with our college-aged children, trips out of state, a birthday party for my 80-year-old father, and preparations for enduring a hurricane. August included a ride back from Atlanta on Amtrak, on which I pondered the sad difference between public transportation in countries I have visited overseas and public transportation in our country. That disappointing difference, however, has not weakened my resolve to take public transportation more often.  One personal promise I made to myself during August was not to allow politics to make me crazy or despairing. Though I feel strongly that the best choice for the presidential election is the Democratic choice, I refuse to let vitriolic polarization poison my daily attempts at maintaining some portion of happiness in my own life. I try to remember the words of my favorite Stoic philosopher, Seneca:

But there is no point in banishing the causes of private sorrow, for sometimes we are gripped by a hatred of the human race. When you consider how rare is simplicity and how unknown is innocence, how you scarcely ever find loyalty except when it is expedient, what a host of successful crimes you come across, and all the things equally hateful that men gain and lose through lust, and how ambition is now so far from setting limits to itself that it acquires a lustre of viciousness -- all this drives the mind into a darkness whose shadows overwhelm it, as though those virtues were overturned which it is not possible to hope for and not useful to possess. We must therefore school ourselves to regard all commonly held vices as not hateful but ridiculous, and we should imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus. For whenever these went out in public, the latter used to weep and the former to laugh; the latter thought all our activities sorrows, the former, follies. So we should make light of all things and endure them with tolerance: it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it. Bear in mind too that he deserves better of the human race as well as who laughs at it than he who grieves over it; since the one allows it a fair prospect of hope, while the other stupidly laments over things he cannot hope will be put right. [from "On Tranquility of Mind"]

Maintaining that balance can be quite tricky, especially in this crazy season of political conventions, presidential aspirations, and pernicious propaganda, but recent weather here in Louisiana helped put things in perspective. While Clint Eastwood was talking to an empty chair in Tampa, we were hunkered down in the darkness as Hurricane Isaac slowly dumped rain that flooded our rivers and creeks, inundating whole neighborhoods. Fortunately, our house is on high ground--comparatively, that is--and we were without electricity only 49 hours. Our only access to news was a battery-powered radio, with which I kept up-to-date on the rising waters and evacuations and somewhat informed of the outside world through National Public Radio.

I'll continue to read my favorite political bloggers and be engaged in the political process, but I'll bear in mind that my daily happiness is determined by me, not a pundit, preacher, prophet, or political leader. As Seneca says:

Whatever is best for a human being lies outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away. The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. [from "Consolation to Helvia"]