Rain on the Beach #028

So, hello and welcome back to Every Dawn. Today, I want to tell you about a somewhat silly moment on the beach where I was a few days ago with my family. And, you know, we're in Greece on a holiday, and the whole point of going to Greece on a holiday is that you go to the beach, obviously.

It was a nice week. We had booked our holiday home, and we are paying a lot of money for this, right? As it is with these holiday homes, they are not cheap. And then, as we go to the beach to sit down and enjoy the sun, suddenly it starts raining. And this is particularly silly in Greece because in Greece, it is not supposed to rain in summer, and often it will go months without raining. So, nobody expected this, and suddenly, sitting there on the beach, having paid all this money to be there, and it rains.

So, at the beginning, I was very upset about this, and I thought that this is unjust, this is stupid. Why am I here? Why do I pay so much money in order to be rained upon? But then I remembered Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor who was also a philosopher. And Marcus Aurelius writes the following, and I will read it to you. He says, "It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing and not to be disturbed in our soul, for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgments."

So, this is a little surprising when you see it for the first time because this seems to be saying that it is a good thing to not have an opinion, while we generally think that opinions are very important to us. We think that democracy and freedom is all about having your opinions, but actually, the Stoics saw this differently, and they thought that the most powerful use of your mind is to actually not have an opinion because our opinions are what takes away our freedom, what enslaves us, or what forces us to see the world in a particular way.

So, when I am sitting there in the rain on my beach, I have an opinion about the rain, and this opinion is negative. This opinion forces me into a negative state of mind. I regret being there. I regret spending the money to get there, all these things, while if I just have no opinion about it, then I will just accept it as rain, and perhaps I will see its positive sides. I will see that this rain is necessary because it also feeds the tree under which I'm sitting on the beach and which provides shade for me, or this rain is important for the animals, for the insects, for whatever else lives around this beach.

So actually, having no opinion about the rain frees my mind and instead of trapping me into having these negative thoughts suddenly allows me to see the whole picture. And then I can perhaps even enjoy the rain for a moment. I can step out of my personal perspective, which is what the opinion means, right? How I see it, how it affects me, and instead, I'm able to see how the whole of the world is affected by the thing that I originally did not like. And so, perhaps now I will find a reason to like it. Perhaps now, there is a way how I can have a free and more positive relationship to this rain.

So, this is all I wanted to tell you today. If you want, you can go back on Daily Philosophy. I have a separate YouTube channel called Daily Philosophy, and there is a whole video about Marcus Aurelius. I will leave a link here:

…so if you like to learn more about it, go back there and watch that video. Thank you, and see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.