O daily stoic de hj foi fantástico.
E o q ele narra aconteceu comigo. Deixei de ajudar um vendedor no metrô, depois de comprar algumas coisas aleatórias essa manhã, aproveitando a Black friday.
O q passou, passou. Agora é tentar ser melhor daqui pra frente.
(pra quem não sabe, o daily stoic é uma newsletter do Ryan Holliday, vejam mais em dailystoic.com)
Vou transcrever aqui o de hoje
That nice, warm feeling you’re carrying over from Thanksgiving? That fullness after any kind of big family get-together? From the meal, from the company, from
plenty of it? It’s important that you realize not everyone is feeling that right now.
In fact, many people are experiencing the exact opposite. More than 950 million people globally are food insecure. More than 38 million people in America still face hunger. And some 1.5 million children lost their primary or secondary caregiver from COVID-19 and now, those children don’t know where their next meal is coming from. You might be thinking: So what? What can I do about it? Stoicism is about focusing on what’s in my control, why should I care about some slow-moving humanitarian crisis?
Because, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, those suffering humans are us, and we are them. To allow harm to come to them—through indifference, through callousness—is to allow harm to come to ourselves. It’s why the most magnificent moment of Marcus’s reign was the day he decided to sell off the palace furnishings to keep Rome going—to help those in need. Hierocles was a Roman Stoic who spoke of “circles of concern.” Our first concern, he said, was our mind, but beyond this was our concern for our bodies, for our immediate family, then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world. The work of philosophy, he said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible. This is our obligation. It is our duty to help others. To serve others. To illustrate those virtues of courage and justice toward and for and through others.
So today, so called Black Friday, when some people might go line up to get a deal on a flat-screen television or gorge on leftovers, let us instead put our energy towards helping the less fortunate. Let us help people from going hungry. Let us alleviate someone’s worry and fear. Let us put food on their table.
