Back from London with a broken heart having met and then having to leave my first gorgeous little grandchild
This week I am back from London with a broken heart having met and then having to leave my first gorgeous little grandchild. Reflecting on the trials of a global community, I have a full week ahead and I’m pretty sure few are interested in seeing my videos of a five-month old smiling incessantly. So it was timely to read Ryan Holiday’s latest blog (and a coincidence as I saw his presentation in Sydney the night before I left for London).
Ryan’s work on research of the Stoics is, of course, another pea in the pod with gravitas. Where Stoics work on the mind, gravitas works of the method. We are all in the same garden.
This is what Ryan has to say in the Daily Stoic today:
“It’s one thing to get up there and perform. It’s one thing to show your kids a wonderful day. It’s one thing to go make the sale. It’s one thing to put in a full twelve hour shift.
It’s another thing to do it after another wrenching custody handoff. It’s another to do it as you’re grieving. It’s another to do it when you’re filled with shame. It’s another to do it when you feel so terribly alone.
Stoicism is not the absence of emotion. We have stories of Marcus Aurelius crying—multiple, in fact. We have incredibly thoughtful essays from Seneca on grief and loss The Stoics made beautiful works of art, they wrote poetry, they loved the theater. These were people that felt, no question.
But they also understood that life, especially leadership, requires being able to balance these emotions with the responsibilities and duties each of us have. “Lights, camera, bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die,” Taylor Swift sings in “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.” We can imagine Marcus Aurelius trying to hit his marks, trying to perform the public duties of the emperor even as a plague devastated Rome, even as he grieved the loss of another one of his children, even as he suffered from his own debilitating health issues.
We have to process these emotions, to be sure. We may also need to set them aside for a moment—because our children are depending on us, because we have to make a living, because we made a commitment, and because the world is counting on us.
Life doesn’t care if you have a broken heart, only that if we hit our marks.”
Let me know your thoughts.
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