For the Record

I cannot help but keeping a copy here the following letter
from a modern Stoic.

    This verse in one of Alice in Chains’ most haunting
    songs captures the essence of the Stoic battle:

        And yet I find
        And yet I find
        Repeating in my head
        If I can't be my own
        I'd feel better dead

    The need to be one’s own. One’s own man. Free from
    outside influence. Free from tyranny. Free from anxiety.
    Fear. Unnecessary pain. To be free from the slavery that
    Seneca talked about—the slavery of pointless
    obligations, other people’s expectations, materialism,
    the slavery of addiction or ambition.
  
    And yet it is with some tragic irony that the man who
    wrote that lyric was for too much of his talented
    artistic life not his own. He was addicted to heroin and
    cocaine, cigarettes and self-loathing. In the end it was
    death that relieved him of those forms of slavery, or
    rather we could say that the slavery killed him and
    deprived us of him exactly 16 years ago yesterday.
    
    This is sadly a common Stoic theme too—to fall
    personally short of the beauty of words and the insights
    of the philosophy. To paraphrase an earlier part of the
    song, yet we fight, yet we fight...
  
    So let us repeat that Stoic mantra in our head today and
    pray for strength that Layne Staley didn’t have.

[7grizzly]

回复 '暖冬cool夏' 的评论 : Thank you, my friend, for the thought, to which I'd respond with a Bruce Lee quote: "A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at." And I wouldn't under-estimate such a goal.

[暖冬cool夏]

The irony tells us that few people can truly stay "free", however ideal the pursuit is. :)) It is SO hard to be ", free" when we live in this worldly universe.