I believe think it wise to crank it up, especially for those with a paid holiday! Some reading and The Black Crowes for you pleasure.

Thank you for following the discussion to the last diary on this topic for now. If you'd like to catch up, see it in my blog. So far we have looked at a number of building blocks of the Stoic way of life.

1. What is the goal of life? Stoicism says it is to flourish.
2: What is good? Stoicism says there is a third category in the moral universe, namely “neutral.” Good and evil reside only within us. Neutrals – preferred and dispreferred – are things and events external to us.
3. What is within our power to do? We talked about what is within our power, our character.
We went over the proper use of sensory impressions. We discussed how to use new scripts to override poor thoughts brought on by neural pathways created by trauma reactions.
In this part, we discuss two last questions:
4. How should I act?
5. How should I live?
Part 1/3 is here: http://caucus99percent.com/content/stoicism-trauma-survivors-part-13

Tough times calls for tough people. Personal resilience begins with toughening our minds. See, in G's take on human biology, the mind supports the spine. A weak mind causes the spine to dissolve. My major concern with progressives is the mind-spine connection. Only hard work creates a tough mind. Our minds are plastic: life will mold it for you if you don't construct it through will, hard work, perseverance. OK, there's work to do. First principle: modern ethics (along with all of modern philosophy) is bullshit. Classical times was tougher than our time. It produced tough-minded people. The classical world followed virtue-based ethics. I follow them. Below is a summary I did for myself of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. It explains the classical world's goal of life and I organized extracts of Aristotle's words into a coherent summary for my own use.