Shower Thoughts: An “unlimited minutes per month” phone plan really only gives you 44,640 minutes per month at best.
What are some changes to your daily routine since lockdown? Are there additions to your diet? Perhaps you stopped doing something or perhaps started buying some new items?
I am eating more immune-building foods. Adding fermented and spicy foods to my diets, such as drinking Kombucha and adding chili peppers, garlic or hot sauce to dishes (but not my oatmeal). Also, I stopped shaving my legs. Yep. I went right from no-shave winter into no-shave lockdown. If I shaved right now I could donate my hair to a wig charity. No lie. Werewolf time = freedom.
Before the lockdown, way back in October last year, I joined a monthly Stoic discussion group. The group is hosted by a gentleman who applies stoicism to his daily life to help process his epilepsy. Absolutely stimulating and thought-provoking discussions! I really enjoy learning about the ways to apply stoicism to my everyday. So, to help keep my mind focused on this new way of thinking, I signed up for a newsletter dailystoic.com . The message this morning jumped off the page! The author is responding to Christians in the bible belt continuing to attend church because “the blood of Jesus will protect me.” Allow me to share a portion of it with you:
A Stoic is rational enough to look at the numbers and realize that most of us are likely to survive the coronavirus, if we do in fact get it. Most cases are very mild. If you’re a healthy, relatively young person, chances are you’re going to be fine. Who knows, maybe believing in Jesus will insulate you further. But that’s not why we’re locked down, why we’ve inflicted trillions of dollars of losses to the global economy in an effort to “flatten the curve.” We’re doing these things to protect the most vulnerable amongst us—people for whom the mortality rate can be up to ten times higher. It’s to protect people with preexisting conditions, people battling cancer, people who are recovering from a lung transplant, people with only one kidney, and our elders from whom we would be remiss not to take this opportunity to learn from.
Remember what Marcus Aurelius said: What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee. A society that is callous and indifferent to the weak and the vulnerable destroys itself. A society that betrays its elders—even if those elders have been indifferent and callous themselves—betrays itself. *
Here is my Monday mood in meme form. It doesn’t have a pun, but does it REALY need one? Thank you for visiting. Stay safe! -Shannon
reference:
dailystoic.com for 4/27/2020. Read the complete article here-
shannon p. laws 