Fourth Form of Madness

A few weeks back a ripper of a storm tore through my suburb. It was so bad it broke our garage door, knocked a few trees over and left us (and many others without power) for two days. I love storms, all that untamed and uncontrolled naturalness and I got to admit I also liked the effect of being without power for two days (once I got over not having a hot shower!).

We have so much technology buzzing around us, there is always this phone to answer, this tv show to watch, this twitter to read and so on into infinity, one distraction rolling into another, so we become constantly distracted. With the electricity out, it cut out a fair bit of this noise. So when my husband, my mother (who is currently living with me) and I found ourselves at home for the second night in a row in the dark, we embraced the situation and made it fun. We ordered pizzas in (yay good excuse for junk food) as we had no cooking facilities and did not trust most of the food in our fridge by this stage (I studied microbiology for a semester at uni – I’m a little touchy about micro growth in food in uncooled conditions, and don’t get me started on wooden chopping boards!). We sat around enjoying our pizza and apple cider (luckily the bottle shop still had power) and discussed what was going on in our lives over numerous vanilla scented candles. It was beautiful and I felt like I had spent some quality time with both my mother and husband instead of my usual style of trying to fit conversation around writing a text or during commercial breaks. After a chat, we all huddled closely around my Mac which had enough power on it to watch a movie I had downloaded a few days earlier (okay so we did fall back on distracting technology just a tad but at least we were huddled together :-)). When it was time for bed we each took a candle, bid each other goodnight and went to our candlelit bedrooms. It was a really special evening.

On reflection this whole evening reminded me of one of my favourite Greek philosophers, Seneca. Seneca was one of the great Greek Stoics. So what’s a Stoic? In a nutshell, stoic philosophy generally follows the principle that life will run as it does and it is not for you to mould life into the shape that you want it to be, but rather for you to let life be, and learn not to let it disturb you so. To keep a constant temperament, regardless of whether conditions are good or bad in your life. Sound familiar? To me the teachings of Buddha are very similar to Seneca, even though Buddha walked a very different part of the earth almost 500 years prior to his Greek contemporary. I guess really good concepts need to keep coming up across the ages, cause we might miss them the first time billion times they come to us.

One of my favourite Seneca quotes goes something like this “Each month, for two days, go without all those things you think you could not live without and you are scared of losing. At the end of this two days, you will see, you can live out these things, life will still roll on with or without them. With this realisation these things will no longer have any power over you and you have increased your freedom.” I love this advice, I’m yet to put it in practice on a regular basis but I still love this advice.

So I guess that those two nights without power was an enforced Seneca retreat of some kind. I enjoyed it, it gave me time to reconnect with my husband and my mother, it gave me a welcome break from the computer and it allowed me to enjoy one of my biggest joys in life, vanilla candles!!!!!! Maybe, just maybe that Seneca was onto something!