Sextus Philosophicus

Dear Lucas,

I read your letter and your concerns about your feelings, let me start with: don’t do it yet.

As long as she is in a relationship, keep at a distance and wait, no matter how heavy it is on your heart. When a woman is in a relationship she doesn’t think romantically about other men.

My advice is so: Seducing a woman in a relationship is like a pirate ambushing trading vessels, If it’s too early, the coast guard will stop the ambush, too late and the ship will have escaped.

Make sure you are exactly at the right time, just before or just after she leaves her lover.

But Lucas, I need to heed you for these extreme emotions like love. One should keep them to a minimum because, although it feels good, the feelings are so extreme that when they disappears, it feels as if you feel bad even though you still feel better then neutral*.

‘If a Berber would move to northern Italy, he would feel as if it is cold, even though it is warm.’ The best for long time happiness and ataraxia is not to live in extremes, but to keep moderate.

Do not seek her out, do not fill walls with her name, do not collect her hairs. If you do that, she will fill your mind up, but if she marries suddenly any thought about her will be negative, then your mind will be filled with sadness.

Best is to enjoy small pleasures that can’t turn sour, instead of extreme pleasures that can turn into extreme sorrow.

Instead, you should strive for friendships, they are less extreme forms of love.

A friend can give you support that you can’t get from a loved one and friendship doesn’t make you make dumb choices.

Epicurus’ idea of a commune, as you might know, is all about distancing yourself from those who want to make you feel bad, use or destroy you and instead surround yourself with those who want you to feel good, help and grow.

Before I leave, I’ll give you a small piece of my wisdom: ‘It’s easy to fall in love and easy to fall out, and that fall is hard, it’s hard to fall in friendship and hard to fall out, but that fall is softer’

Go well

I’m sorry for the late response to your letter, I’ve been ill for the last four days, it was painful but certainly good for me. You might ask: “Good? Being ill?” To that I say: Yes, but not good for my body, but for my mind. You see, like the skin of a boxer getting less sensitive to the strikes of his opponent, the mind too can get less sensitive to pain. I feel less pain then when I got it when I was small, I’m able to walk around and eat, where a few years ago I could barely roll out of bed. Diogenes too, as you know how much I admire him, acted to this: he would walk around in the snow barefooted so that he wouldn’t feel the pain of the cold anymore and in that way make an icy winter night as pleasant as a spring morning. I am not so far to say that for me the pain doesn’t matter, but I’m sure it will return and I’ll defeat it again and again until I’m strong enough to not be bothered by it anymore.

And Lucas, you need to promise me something, the next time you poop, thank your body for letting it happen. I did so after three days of constipation. So I want to give you some words of wisdom before I end this letter: ‘What has not been lost can not be loved.’ This works with everything, I had lost the ability to poop and thus when I regained it, I loved it. You have never lost your ability to poop so you probably only think of it as a bother. One might bring in: “But a mother can love her son without losing him.” Well, a mother has lost her son many times before really losing him. My mother would say to me: “Stay safe” Every time I left my home because I was already run over, killed or worse in her mind. So be thankful for pooping today and sneezing tomorrow, for we all need to be more thankful for things that we have not lost. And a thankful mind is one that is more at ease.

-Tusculae Disputationes V 104-105

I believe I can now be asked to enlighten the folks. Maybe if your questions are important enough *cough* probably not you're all uneducated wingless chickens *cough* i can write a book about it.