Say Woe To The Vanquished To Complaints
Or why we should not submit to negative thoughts
The mission here is what the Stoics called ἄσκησις, which means practice or training. So while the subjects shift from envy to wretched weather to military selection processes, the principles are always the same – those of Stoicism. By hammering these principles in the form of discourse, we can make it a habit of our mind to master our inner dialogue and exercise a savage joy in living.
I became sick on one of my deployments.
It started with mild brain fog and gut pain, and then devolved into inflammation, arrhythmia, and digestive issues.
I did not know it at the time, but I was suffering from infectious colitis and my colon was being eaten from the inside out. My body learned to treat healthy foods and household chemicals as if they were infectious agents.
From that moment on, my immune system has been at war with my own body in some confused attempt to save it from an imaginary infection. When played out on the national level, this would be like the Ukrainian military waging war on Ukrainian citizens to protect them from a Russian invasion.
It is madness.
When I was offered immunosuppressants and pills of all sorts that would’ve had me drooling on myself in a stupor like a corpse, I refused. So I began experimenting on myself and found the greatest benefit to come from severely restricting my diet.
My odyssey with autoimmunity went on to far greater extremes that aren’t relevant here.
What I want to focus on are my distinct memories of complaining incessantly. I complained about the loss of coffee, and Guinness, and chicken, and Hint of Lime Tostitos, and every other food of the earth that wasn’t one of the dozen or so that I could eat without severe reactions.
It’s this complaining that I am fascinated by, this wishing for things to be other than they are.
I was reminded of this the other day when I tripped over the dishwasher door that was lying open. I cursed the gods for this unforgivable injustice and shook my head as I walked around the island of my kitchen, only to then drop my keys on the floor because I wasn’t paying attention to what my own hands were doing while I was shaking my head.
What a waste. What then? I argue that there is never a reason to complain - about anything.
Why?
Well, what if I complained about everything? Who would want to spend time with me? Who would love me? I would be a miserable mate, and if some saint found the ability to love me anyway, they would only be able to do so despite this annoying and petty flaw. People would call me Eeyore behind my back and I would have earned it. My friends and family would have to think twice, even if only for a second, before spending their time with me and the negativity I carry around with me like the flu.
I would, in a sense, be a cancer in the body of nature. And what would she say to me? “I did not breathe life into you to be ungrateful for the beauty of the Milky Way or the primal pull of a camp fire or the taste of figs, but I have given you the option to be an ungrateful savage if you choose. This too I leave up to you: whether you choose to stay or not.”
That last part is everything.
Natures gifts, whether we choose to love them or not, are what they are. What right do I have to complain about anything when these are the terms of my existence?
We have been invited into this perfect universe and given perfect freedom. If we don’t like the rules of a board game, nature has made it so that we can gather our things and walk out the door. Just so, if we don’t like the rules of existence – and if the thing I’m complaining about is actually unbearable – again, nature has blessed us with an out. It is then that we might find ourselves thanking nature for standing this Door (capital D) open for us.
Death and its Door are not evil. Do we say that all of the 100+ billion humans who have ever died have suffered an evil? No, we say that they died. They walked through the Door and returned to where they came from, and for many of them, death was a means to die in command of themselves as opposed to living in submission to some despotic loser.
And what happens when the misfortune is bearable, as most of ours are? Well now we can turn death around in our hands and view it from another angle.
Why complain about this misfortune when there are those who cannot complain at all because they’re dead?
Tripping over the dishwasher or death?
Eating figs for the rest of my life or death?
Governing my mind or death?
How do our thoughts of the thing we wish to lament and moan and lose sleep about change when we remember that we are here and enduring this misfortune entirely by choice? In comparison to walking through the Door, misfortunes aren’t so misfortunate, and reflecting on this, I feel obligated to stop and take an extra second to stare at the rose-red glow of dusk instead of complaining about some worthless grievance.
What then?
It is from those things that our first impulse is to complain about that we can learn true gratitude; we can turn them on their head and test ourselves against them. Why then would we not be grateful for every single thing that happens, especially those things that we are about to complain about?
So how do we remedy this self-inflicted knee capping?
As I’m driving and the sun is coming through my windshield at just the wrong angle, I can say “Of course it would be,” or I can watch the negative thought evaporate and say “woe to the vanquished.” And when I feel the pain of my immune system waging war on my body, I can say “God, why would you do this to me?” or I can stare the negative thought out of existence and say “woe to the vanquished”.
Epictetus makes it clear that buried within every challenge and annoyance and irritant is a test.
We can ask ourselves: “Is this under my control?”
If it is not under my control, why complain when I can’t do anything about it?
If it is under my control, why complain when I can own it and flow with it and breathe with it and fight with it and when I'm done with it, say “woe to the vanquished” to it?
Nicely said. I started having Colitis symptoms when I was in middle school, but wasn't diagnosed till I was about 19/20 and bleeding worrying quantities of blood into the toilet every day. It took me years to sort out the fasting and restricted eating regime that keeps me on track.
In the early years I'm sure I complained a bit, but the bigger problem was the negative thought patterns which made all of life so much worse than it had to be. Now I see it as a blessing. It's forced me to be healthier. It's forced me to be disciplined. It's forced me to avoid excess and to care for my body more than I otherwise might.
Minus the scar tissue that now likely covers my colon and may inhibit nutrient absorption, I'm pretty sure I'm way better off psychologically and physically because I developed a horrible autoimmune disease.
Funny how that works.
Well done