“If it is not right, do not do it. I it is not true, do not say it.”

Marcus Aurelius

Now that I’m not really thinking about how to manipulate my writing, I have found this to be so much more enjoyable. Honesty, is a powerful stress relief.

In the past blog posts I tried to sound like a roman stoic, serious and virtuous, but now that I think about it, I would just be lying to myself and to you, ha that would certainly not be a stoic virtue, courage instead is a paramount stoic virtue, and courage is what is needed to be honest.

Honesty and truth is not something we do or at least I do very often, we are always lying

to ourselves and to others. We lie everytime we say something to please, basically every time we don’t say or do what we inside know is not true. We use justify our actions with bigger lies, bigger lies like we are a nice person so we are nice all the time, not that being nice is bad, it is good most of the time. But, when we are nice all the time to hide what we really feel or think that is when we are lying. Being nice and being in control are two radical different things.

We choose to lie to manipulate, to manipulate reality, and that is the problem I was having when I tried to write as if I was Marcus Aurelius, truly impossible. Why would I want to write like him, well because he was a great man, but in ultimate instance, what I’m really doing is trying to be something I’m not, and that is not being real, that is lying.

I said earlier that I felt so much more at ease writing without constraining my vocabulary and just writing freely, but the realization was that to achieve that, I had to start being real, to myself and to you. I had the fear that by doing so I would be cursing the entire time, but it hasn’t been (fucking) ha, necessary. It is as it is.

Courage and vulnerability come in hand, one simply cannot be without the other. Honesty, requires courage and to be courageous we have to be vulnerable, open up to possibilite and that is why I think, being honest and truthful opens so much possibilite up. When we are in a state of protection, of manipulation and fear basically, we don’t open up to what can be, what can happen, we are just too busy trying to protect something (our ego I guess) and so we do not focus on what is really out there, we try to manufacture reality and become separated from it. Se we are unease, we don’t really know if we are going to be successful in our manipulations so we become really stressed.

Honesty accompanied with courage and vulnerability as it has to be, relieves us from stress, as we are no longer putting mental work in manufacturing what is impossible. Being honest is definitely a stoic virtue I wish to keep with myself.

There is a great phrase, that sets for the idea.

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”

― Augustine of Hippo