Stoics and Immortality

Show me a man who though sick is happy, though in danger is happy, though dying is happy, though condemned to exile is happy, though in disrepute is happy. Show him! By the gods, I would fain see a Stoic. — Epictetus

The lesson from looking at the history of the human race and the long, long story of blood-stained evolution is that we must just make the best of our time in the universe. There may be no such thing as a full grown Stoic but at least we can try our best to meet our fate with a positive, strong spirit. Just making the best of it. Not weeping more than we can avoid. And helping our fellow travellers through the valley of the shadow of death.

The journey does not take long. Think of the hundreds of millions of years of life so far on Earth. The forgotten lives of humans and dinosaurs. Your 70 years or 370 years are nothing. Don't worry too much! It will soon be over.

But let us try to remember and give a little bit of immortality to those lives which have returned to dust and live with the awareness of eternity and those who were here before us.

Heraclitus

Heraclitus said; “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man”. Is Britain today the same country as it was last year, the same as it was in 1950, 1450 or in 650. The observer also is not the man he was yesterday or 30 years ago. If the people living in a country or observing it are in constant flux why should anyone worry about change?

Why should the Hawaiians of 1850 or the English of 1850 if they could look back from the present object to the differing deaths by change of their countries? Has anything been lost by the fact that they no longer exist? Do their countries perhaps still exist in the eye of eternity?

The Britain of 1950 mutated into something different day by day without the change being detectable. But still there is continuity in Britain just as there would be with an individual born in 1950. The continuity is memory and history of what was once and will not be so again. The timeline is like a cable tying the years together like beads on a necklace.