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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 4411529, member: 72790&quot;]Thanks for the article. I must tell you, however that the philosophy of Stoicism, at least as first proposed by Zeno, has always had a tendency to get people to accept everything that happens to them as part of some design or plan and that not accepting all that comes our way is simply kicking at the goad. Marcus seems to have recognized that not all that happens to us is our fate and that some things that seem irrevocable and unalterable fate are not so and can be changed. I don&#039;t believe most Stoics admitted that. Ultimately death claims us all and that ultimate fate will be our end (or beginning, depending on how you view things like one&#039;s demise) but there is much in our lives that is not fixed fate and is thus alterable. That is the sort of belief that makes resistance to evil, or calamity as in this virus situation, possible and potentially effective. Had Marcus as emperor not recognized that not all is fate, that some evils could be overcome we all might be speaking a dialect of Marcomanic German. Happiness, or in the case of Stoicism, contentment, will be achievable, only when we realize the distinction between what is unalterable fate (our impending demise) and what is alterable, how we will meet it when it arrives. The coin below is a sestertius of Marcus when he was a young lad and the Caesar of Antoninus Pius and a time when HILARITAS (on the reverse) was still possible. Sear 4802, ca.146 AD</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; .[ATTACH=full]1107593[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1107594[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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