“There is no future love,” Tolstoy wrote when he thought about the paradoxical needs of love. “Love is only in the present. A person who does not show love in the present has no love.” It's a hard concept to accept – we've been socialized to believe and hold back the happy future that always follows all meaningful relationships. But what happens when love, regardless of its nature and stages, dissolves under the endless forces of time and change, either through death or some other, more deliberate demise? In the midst of what feels like inevitable loss, how do we feel about the fact that even the most beautiful, most joyful things in life are simply borrowed from the universe, given to us in the moment?
Two thousand years ago, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c. 55–135 AD) said that the solution to this painful grief is not to be found in protecting ourselves from possible loss with artificial defenses but, when the loss comes, in directing ourselves to it and to what preceded it in a different way—in training ourselves not only to accept but also to accept the temporary nature of all those things we desire with all the most important and most important things. disappears, we are left with the irrevocable joy that it entered our lives at all and lived through it when it did.
In The Discourses of Epictetus (public library), under the title That we should not be moved by the desire for those things that are not in our powerthe Stoic writes:
Who is good if he doesn't know who he is? Who knows what he is, if he forgets that things that are made perish, and that it is impossible for a man to live with another forever?
Epictetus – an advocate of the good practice of introspection used with kindness – goes on to offer a meditation on releasing the grip of grief at permanent separation from a loved one:
When you are pleased with something, rejoice as if with nothing else that cannot be taken away, but with something like this, such as an earthen pot, or a glass cup, so that, when it is broken, you will remember what it was, and not be troubled … you were given a bunch of grapes at the appointed time of the year. But if you like that in winter, you are fools; So if you wish for your son or your friend when it is not allowed for you, you should know that you wish for a fig in winter.
With a sentiment that speaks of the physical death of our loved ones, but applies equally to the loss of love in a non-physical sense, Epictetus adds:
At times when you are enjoying something, put in front of you the opposite view. What is the harm while kissing your child to say in a eloquent voice, “Tomorrow you will die”; and to a friend too, “Tomorrow you will leave or I will leave, and we will never see each other again”?
If we could look at what we love in that way, Epictetus says, its inevitable loss would leave us with an unending desolation but what Abraham Lincoln would later call “a sweet, sad feeling in your heart.” To preserve the memory of the sweetness of love without allowing the pain of separation and loss to become bitter is perhaps the bereaved heart's greatest challenge, and its greatest achievement.
Complete this Epictetus piece with lasting detail Lectures by computing pioneer Alan Turing on love and loss and other great artists, scientists, and writers on how to live and lose, then revisit more of the Stoics' timeless support for life's trauma: Seneca on resilience in the face of loss, the cure for anxiety, and what it means to be generous, Marcus Aurelius to get up in the morning and endure your life in the morning.
HT Aeon
