Reasons not to worry - Brigid Delaney

•  In ancient Stoicism I found people, just like us, longing to find meaning and connection, to feel whole and tranquil, to love and be loved, to have a harmonious family life, fulfilling and meaningful work, intimate and nourishing friendships, a sense of contributing to your community, belonging to something greater than yourself

1. acknowledge that you cant control much of what goes on in your life.
2. See that your emotions are the product of how you think about the world.
3. Accept that bad things are bound to happen to you from time to time, just as they do to everyone else.
4. See yourself as part of a larger whole, not an isolated individual; part of the human race, part of nature.
5. Think of everything you have as not your own, but simply on loan, that one day will be taken away

• The Stoics had a penchant for looking life in the face, seeing it for what it was, loving it fiercely anyway (despite everything... because of everything) and then finally - letting go
• ataraxia is a state of contentment or peace where the world can be falling in around your ears, but your equilibium is undisturbed
• requiring that you do your best, be rational, strive to be virtuous [...] that is all that you can do and all that can be done.
• Dont waste your energy trying to change people
• Whatever can happen at any time can happen today - seneca
• Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking - marcus aurelius
• Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune - seneca
• life is random and arbitrary, bad things happen even if you take all precautions
• treating every occasion with my parents as if it will be the last has sharpened my enjoyment of their company
• so many of us never actually begin our lives. were too busy working and making money, promising that one day well stop and properly rest and luxuriate in the present
• stoics were highly attuned to time, seeing it as the only true currency we have. 
• our most democratic curreny: everyone is given an allotment of time
• an ancient stoic would see excessive use of the internet as an extremely poor use of tie. Would I take a bunch of money and just throw it in the bin? No. But somehow I squander my time online without a second thought.
• Can you show me even one person who sets a price on his time, who knows the worth of a day, who realises that every day is a day when he is dying?
• until we reach this mysterious end point called "one day"
• But looking back, having a wealth of time felt better and more magical than having a lot of money in the bank.
• time - and how you spend it - is a much more important question than status and how much you get paid.
• The things we can control: our character, the way we treat other and our actions and reactions. Epictetus then urges us to forget trying to control the rest. To do so is just a waste of time and energy.
• You work out first what you can control, and place your efforts there, and dont waste time and energy worrying about what you cant control
• There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will
• The stoics strived to maintain was their tranquillity - and not let their equilibrium be disturbed too much by what was outside those few things that they could control.
• When the number of options available is limited, it is foolish to fuss and fret. We should instead simply choose the best of them and get on with life. To behave otherwise is a precious waste of time and energy.
• The first step is to acknowledge a change in reality and then to try to adapt. requires not resisting the change. not looking back and mourning what was. acklowledging that change is a part of life.
• The universe is change - our life is what our thoughts make it
• Alive time or dead time
• freaking out, get nothing done, netflix, weed, social media
• grow, utilize the day, be constructive
• preferred indifferents
• its preferable to have health and wealth than not but ultimately you should be indifferent
• that means not clinging to things or falling apart if you lose them
• so while it fine to be wealthy, you just have to be okay with (or indifferent to) losing all your wealth
• you should be okay with having them - and okay with not having them
• diogenes simple values and lack of material possessions were meant to show that we waster our lives working and striving for things that are not necessary or meaningul for life. that you need nothing material to have a good life. If you owned nothing and wanted nothing, then you have taken your power back, because you are not trying to get anything from anybody.
• If you fix your mood to something outside you [a boss,...], then your inner state will always be outside your control.
• unperturbed - without inner trouble
• ataraxia
• the tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say, or think, or do. Only what you do.
• When you get rid of your fear of failure and what other people think, everything becomes more relaxed and fun. You just enjoy the ride.
• Our cognitive biases swinging towards pessimism a lot of the time.
• If we dont form a judgement about something, were less likely to rumiate on it or cling to it and become attached. Just let life unfold. Experience things in a non-reactive, open way. Tasks, relationships with others and just the experience of life become a lot easier when you're not loading every little thing up with a judgement.
• When we stop labelling things, life suddenly gets a lot easier. It just happens. One thing follow the next, and we dont get stuck,
• life is for us, not against us
• We wouldnt talk to our worst enemy the way we often talk to ourselves.
• The "should have" loop... Instead we just accept the situation - the present moment - as is. ... We are suddenly not fighting with life, wishing it were different.
• Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
• Everyone is living with their own view of reality
• You can change your experience of the world by realising that your perceptions, and your place in the world can be changed and improved by adjusting your focus and your clarity.
• A thing is not good or bad, it is thinking that made it so, wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet
• We want more from the present moment than it is providing; we have reactions, projections, and old sore spots that get triggered. We create a story around things or people - and it is the story, not the thing itself, which creates our disturbances or our desires.
• One of the most important shifts a person can make is to recognise "reality" instead of existing in a fantasy of subjective perception.
• Ackowledging reality causes less suffering.
• How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.
• We suffer mor in imagination than in reality.
• I have begun to be a friend to myself
• Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him
• how much better to heal than to seek revenge from injury ... would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog
• We demand that others not cause us discomfort
• Eat merely to relieve your hunger, drink merely to quench your thirst, dress merely to keep out the cold, house yourself merely as a protection against personal discomfort
• Moderation? The work never stops. In being moderate we must resist all the siren songs of abundance that are everywhere in todays world
• moderation is the key to feeling, thinking and looking good
• be moderate with food and drink and then, with the excercise of your self-control muscles, youll find moderation spreads to other areas of your life that might be unruly or unbalanced one way or the other
• reframing
• delicious meats are corpses of animals
• cooked animal carcasses
• He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has
• wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants
• away with all these treacherous goods! They look better to those who hope for them than to those who have attained them.
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