Observation

Introduction

The Stoic strives to avoid living his life by impulse.  Beasts live by impulse.  Stated differently, the Stoic strives to think and live rationally.   Living rationally is a human's nature.  Therefore, for a human to live according to Nature, he should live rationally as informed by wisdom.  To be able to accomplish this, he must minimize giving into to spur-of-the-moment impulses and instead pay attention and observe what he is doing and thinking now.

Epictetus (2014) makes excellent points in Discourses 4.12 about constant self-observation and vigilance.  He asks if anything can be better performed with inattention.  Would a carpenter produce better work without attention?  A modern-day example might be: would you want your surgeon to operate on you by impulse or would you rather she self-observe and pay attention to what she is doing?  Anyone who can do things without much attention most likely had to pay attention when he began to learn and act.  Only after much practice would "muscle memory" take over and he could pay less attention.

To emphasize the point of self-observation and attention, I'll simply note an interesting debate from the past decade.  Malcom Gladwell (2008), in his book Outliers, cites a 10,000 hours of practice rule for someone to become an expert in a field.  This was later disputed and clarified that it is not simply practice, but deliberate practice.  Gladwell had cited K. Anders Ericsson regarding the 10,000 hours of practice, but was not too precise in the type of practice needed.  Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993) discuss the concept of deliberate practice in The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, where they state:

In the absence of adequate feedback, efficient learning is impossible and improvement only minimal even for highly motivated subjects. Hence mere repetition of an activity will not automatically lead to improvement in, especially, accuracy of performance.

The key words are "adequate feedback" which imply attention and observation.

This essay will discuss two crucial spiritual exercises in the form of prosochē and attention to the present moment and how I strive to apply them in my life.  The essay will also discuss the related spiritual exercise of acceptance or more commonly known as loving one's fate or amor fati.  Because much as been excellently written on these subjects by Pierre Hadot, I will direct the reader to read various sections of Hadot's books, along with a superb paper written by Chris Fisher.  Therefore, I won't spend many words explaining these concepts, but instead I will summarize them and note how I apply them in my life.

Prosochē / mindfulness

In his excellent essay on Prosochē, Chris Fisher (n.d.) has compiled a list of synonyms and ideas to describe this important exercise.

Chris Fisher's essay is highly recommended and I encourage you to read it and think about it often.  His essay contains an excellent list of passages and references to read and consider.  Much of what he wrote in that essay is based on Pierre Hadot's works, from The Inner Citadel (2001) and Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995).

For me, I've found it helpful to think of prosochē as "minding the gap."

For many people, the typical sequence of events goes as follows: impression → assent → impulse (to act or react)

The reader should take time to think about the order of operations above.  Many of us have been trained to immediately jump to impulse after some impression hits us.  In a sense, we have let the our monkey or reptilian brains do the thinking, instead of letting the rational side or our brains manage our reactions.

Case in point: Your child haphazardly spills milk all over the counter top, and almost instantaneously, you begin to berate and yell at the child for being so clumsy!  In this case, you have let the emotion of anger take over your state of mind.  You have automatically judged the milk being spilled by your child as "bad" and have proceeded to let this judgement turn into an emotion, which then turned into a reaction, which formed into words coming from your brain, out of your mouth and into the ears and brain of your child.  You eventually come to your senses and you may apologize to your child for over-reacting.

You now get a do-over.  What do you do differently?  Would you like a longer pause between impression and impulse?

A quote, largely attributed to Viktor Frankl (but unsubstantiated) says: "Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

What we need to do, is "mind that gap" and practice expanding the space between event and reaction.  This is the goal and essence of prosochē.

How does one gain muscle memory in minding the gap?  What has been helpful for me is: meditation, slowing down and pausing to think and not speak too soon.

Meditation can be practiced in many forms.  From sitting quietly and emptying your mind, to simply focusing on a specific idea or concept for an extended period of time.  I leave it to the reader to determine which kind of meditation is best for them individually - there are applications available to help you train in meditation and much has been shared on the subject in the form of podcasts, YouTube videos and books.  Personally, I love to walk; and every so often I will leave my headphones at home and try to focus only on my breathing and the sounds of my footsteps and the sounds of the forest.  Regardless of approach, the practice of meditation aims at becoming more mindful of the moment or getting into the zone of awareness.  If you can get to a point of being able to snap into the present moment and actively observe, then you will engage the rational part of your brain and think about your response before choosing it.

Slowing down and pausing to think is always beneficial.  While it sounds cliché, counting to 10 and breathing is helpful for me.  If someone says something odd or if something unexpected happens and I find an automatic urge coming to the surface, having the presence of mind to recognize that urge will usually inform me that I need to sit back, count to 10 or pause for a few moments before proceeding.  This space allows my rational mind to get in gear and start engaging with the situation.

There have been many times in my life where I have automatically reacted to a situation.  The spilled milk scenario has happened often.  Other times, people at work or my children have tested my ability to pause and mind the gap.  From technology outages and performance issues at work, to surprise phone calls at 11pm at night about some issue with our kids, I have had to remind myself often to pause, breathe, take a step back and engage the rational part of my brain.  While I'm far from perfect, I feel I have made progress in this area of my Stoic practices.

To close out this section, a good way to remember to be pay constant attention is to think of yourself like a boxer who's hands are always ready and paying attention.  Marcus (2014, book 12.9) wrote this bit of advice to himself:

The model for the application of your principles is the boxer rather than the gladiator. The gladiator puts down or takes up the sword he uses, but the boxer always has his hands and needs only to clench them into fists.

Attention to the present moment in time and space

Pierre Hadot (1995, 2001) often wrote about the present moment as it is the only thing that we must concern ourselves with as both the past and the future are not up to us.  Specifically, I recommend the chapters and passages from The Inner Citadel under the index topics of: attention, consciousness and present.  I also highly recommend two essays from his book Philosophy as a Way of Life.  The first essay is entitled "Spiritual Exercises" on page 81 and the second is "'Only the Present is our Happiness': The Value of the Present Instant in Goethe and in Ancient Philosophy" found on page 217.

As stated above, the fundamental premise of all Stoic thought and action is that the Stoic only has the present moment that is up to him.  The past and the future are not up to him.  Therefore, if the Stoic can engage with the present moment and then the next moment and the next and the next and so on, he can make progress in living wisely.  A similar concept deals with comparing an infinite period of time with the now.  Hadot (1995, p. 224) quotes Epicurus who said, "An infinite period of time could not cause us more pleasure than can be derived from this one, which we can see if finite."

Seneca (2022) expressed this same sentiment in Letter 74.27, where he wrote

Whether you draw a larger or a smaller circle, its size affects its area, not its shape. One circle may remain as it is for a long time while you may contract the other forthwith, or even merge it completely with the sand in which it was drawn; yet each circle has had the same shape. That which is straight is not judged by its size, or by its number, or by its duration; it can no more be made longer than it can be made shorter. Scale down the honourable life as much as you like from the full hundred years, and reduce it to a single day; it is equally honourable.

I'll emphasize Seneca, where he counsels us to "scale down the honourable life as much as you like" and as long as it is honorable, then you are living an honorable life.  And if you keep scaling it down or as Marcus Aurelius and Pierre Hadot often say, "circumscribing the present" or "delimiting the present", then you can focus on the now - something that is comprehensible and manageable.  And if you can make progress now, then why not the next moment as well?

And how do you pay attention to the present moment?  See the first section of this essay!  It is about minding the gap and paying constant attention to your thoughts, desires, emotions and actions.

For me, I try to infuse my day as much as possible with check-points and milestones.  In the morning, I plan for my day and I read Stoic ideas and texts.  This is my time to educate myself and repeat ideas I've encountered before.  Then during the course of the day, I find myself contemplating and then planning and preparing for the next action I will take.  In this manner, I'm always prodding myself via my system to be mindful of the present moment.  I don't always succeed, but I do get back up and try again.  The acknowledgement of failure and the recognition to get back up is how I self-observe and keep moving forward.  At the end of the day, I do a full retrospective of the day; thinking about what I did well, where I failed and how I should have acted differently.  This constant attention to my thoughts, desires and actions helps me be ever mindful of the present moment.

One passage from Marcus Aurelius (2014, book 2.7) is a great reminder for seeking the right balance of self-observation and action.  If we are not careful, we can drift too far into ourselves and forget to live purposefully.  But if we drift too far into constant action, we may expose ourselves to living by impulse.  For this reason, I think, Marcus counseled himself to be mindful - to keep the proper tension between reflection and action.

Do externals tend to distract you? Then give yourself the space to learn some further good lesson, and stop your wandering. That done, you must guard against the other sort of drift. Those who are dead to life and have no aim for the direction of every impulse and, more widely, every thought are drivellers in deed as well as word.

Acceptance and amor fati

In my retrospectives, I've sometimes found myself re-living moments and parts of my life or day.  No doubt, this is living in the past and it is no longer up to me.  I do need to retain those memories and reflect on them so I can learn from them, but once the lesson has been learned, I need not dwell on them any longer.  In reflecting on these moments, it is wise to remember the Stoic practice of acceptance and loving one's fate.

For the background of this practice, I would recommend the reader contemplate the section entitled "Amor fati" in The Inner Citadel (Hadot, 2001) on pages 143-147.  In this section, Pierre Hadot explains this idea of loving one's fate and consent to one's destiny.  The act of consent and love (or not) is up to us.  If we reflect on this idea deeply enough, we will recognize that events have played out and currently play out right now, largely without our input.  Due to the interdependencies and complicated web of cause and effect it is extremely difficult to predict events very accurately.  We may think and act with intent of outcome, but many variables may cause the outcome to be different than we had anticipated.  The only thing left up to us is whether we accept and even love the outcome or not.

The Stoic practice of acceptance and even loving events to occur exactly as they do occur, is a practice that helps us quickly pivot away from stubbornness and complaining and toward an attitude of seeing obstacles as the new path forward (see Meditations 4.1, 5.20, 6.50, 10.33).  The things you should be aware of, in each moment, are when you notice you are complaining about something or wishing something wasn't so.  If you observe in yourself the times when you complain and wish for a different set of circumstances, then you need to snap back to the present moment and think about the concepts of acceptance and amor fati.  Doing so will help you get yourself unstuck and out of the ditch of moaning and onto the road of action and progress.

Since the year 2017, I have faced numerous sets of circumstances where bemoaning them only delayed action.  In the times where I rapidly pivoted towards acceptance and even loving the set of events, I was able to get on with life rather than wallowing in mire.  From being bit by a venomous snake, to my father-in-law dying, to loving that my home was flooded in hurricane Harvey, to welcoming IT outages and even embracing all that has happened stemming from the covid-19 pandemic, I have found myself becoming ambivalent about events and circumstances as they occur.  I have come to understand and am convinced these events are neither good nor bad.  The only thing I have come to care about is ensuring I act and respond rationally in every circumstance.  And every time a new fire-drill in life emerges, I find myself welcoming it and looking at it as another opportunity to prove or improve my excellence of character.

Epictetus (2014, Discourses 2.5) talks a lot about these concepts of loving one's fate.  In closing, I'll share one part of his teachings which I think sums up well the goal of acceptance and loving one's destiny.

For it is impossible, while we are in a body such as ours, and in this universe that contains us, and among such companions as we have, that such things should not happen to us, some to one person and some to another.  It is thus your role to step forward and say what you ought, and to deal with these things as they turn out.  If the judge then proclaims, 'I judge you to be guilty,' you may reply, 'I wish you well.  I have fulfilled my role, it is for you to see whether you have fulfilled yours.'  For he too runs some risk: don't forget that.

Conclusion

Observation is the most often used and one of the most important Stoic spiritual exercises in the Stoic's life.  It is applicable and needed in all three disciplines.  While I've aligned this essay with physics and the discipline of desire, it is an exercise that is infused in all disciplines.  I chose to align it with physics and the discipline of desire largely due to the practice of self-observation of being willing to accept one's circumstances.

In sum, I cannot recommend strongly enough that the reader spend significant time studying, understanding and applying meditation, mindfulness and acceptance.  If you need a place to start, I suggest Pierre Hadot and Chris Fisher.  Reading these two authors will open you up to many other references and resources which will expand your knowledge and enhance your understanding.

References

Aurelius, M. (2014). Meditations (M. Hammond, Trans.). Penguin Classics, An Imprint Of Penguin Books.

Epictetus. (2014). Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (R. Hard, Trans.). Oxford University Press.

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-295x.100.3.363

Fisher, C. (n.d.). Prosochē: Illuminating the Path of the Prokoptōn. Retrieved March 13, 2025, from https://traditionalstoicism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Prosoche-Illuminating-the-Path-of-the-Prokopton.pdf

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers : the story of success. Little, Brown And Company.

Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life : Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (M. Chase, Trans.). Blackwell Publishing.

Hadot, P. (2001). The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (M. Chase, Trans.). Cambridge, Mass. London Harvard University Press.

Seneca, (2022). Moral letters to Lucilius/Letter 74 - Wikisource, the free online library (Gummere, R. Trans.) Wikisource.org. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_74