| The way ahead looks difficult. It is filled with obstacles and challenges. Yet we know we can't go backwards. We know we can't stay where we are. So what do we do? We go forward. In the famous passage in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about how what's thrown on top of a fire is fuel for the fire. That's how we should be he said, converting what comes to us into heat and flame. What's strange about that language there though is that it's sort of passive. It's expecting life to simply provide us fuel, saying we sit back and accept it. That's not really how fire–powerful fires anyway–work. We recently discussed John Vallaint's book, Fire Weather, about the 2016 fire in Fort McMurray Canada, and there's another interesting passage in the book about a fire so intense it registered to climatologists on the scale of a nuclear explosion. "The flames appeared as a wave bending over him," he writes of one man fleeing the fire. "It wasn't an illusion, fires—like flowers, like so many living things—lean toward energy, 'because that's where the unburnt oxygen is. So it's being pulled—drawn if you will—forward by the oxygen.'" Putting aside the tragedy of that particular fire, it's important that we incorporate this imagery into Marcus' metaphor. When we say Amor Fati, when we say The Obstacle Is the Way, we're not talking about just sitting there, being provided with fuel. We're talking about surging forward, pulling ourselves towards the oxygen—going towards the fuel, towards the next thing, never stopping, using all of it. We seek out energy and create energy in the process. We don't wait. We don't stop. We are not passive. We become unstoppable. P.S. Amor Fati, or a love of one's fate, is such a powerful phrase, because you start to feel everything happens for a purpose, and that it is up to you to make this purpose positive and active. That's why we created the Amor Fati medallion — to give you a reminder to carry around that nothing bad can really happen, that everything that happens to us in life can become fuel for us to move forward. In fact, when actor and director Zach Braff came on the Daily Stoic podcast last year (listen to the full episode here), he discussed how Amor Fati helped him translate personal trauma into art, weaving the concept into his recent film A Good Person. "I just found it so powerful," he said, "it's the most simple mantra for me get through the roughest times of my life." If you want to carry around with you the mindset that each and every moment—no matter how challenging—is something to be embraced, not avoided, head here to get our Amor Fati medallion today! |
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