The lockdown continues. My family is now into our 6th week of working from home, and our daughters’ 5th week of school from home. Here in my county in Northern California, around 50 cases of Covid-19 are being reported daily. Fortunately my family and friends are OK so far. (To learn more about what I’ve been up to, check out the Stoic Psychology podcast – described at the end of this post.) One of the weirdest things about this lockdown is the consciousness whiplash I’m experiencing on a daily basis. For me, my awareness of the Coronavirus crisis comes in waves. One minute I remember it, and fully know how bad it is for many people in many places. Another moment, I lose track of what’s happening and why I’m home. My knowledge of the crisis temporarily lapses when I participate in a videocall for work, or even more, as I sit under the live oak tree in the backyard with my kids and take in the springtime air, scented with jasmine and lilac. Then I turn to a news website or Twitter and am confronted with the seriousness of things again. Going back and forth this way is exhausting and strange, and extremely distracting. It’s as if something is always eating away at the edges of my consciousness. I realize that I am incredibly fortunate to be able to put the crisis aside periodically in this way, but I feel a pit in my stomach when I recognize, once again, how difficult this is for many people who are sick or caring for the ill, or who are in essential jobs that put them at risk. We are indeed the lucky ones, for now. I’ve heard from friends, too, that it’s difficult for them to enjoy the luxury of not having to commute through dense traffic, or the benefit of seeing their family more, while others are dealing with a pandemic much more directly and with dire consequences. And how we worry about not just those who are ill or treating them, but the many people who have lost their jobs and income. Even for those not directly fighting the virus, there is a tremendous challenge. We are now all tasked with taking care of each other and ourselves on a new level. We are the direct caregivers of the young and the elderly in our households, and we are responsible for them, as well as for trying to keep ourselves well and sane. It’s a bit how I imagine life was like in small, remote homesteads in the old days: People cut off for weeks or months from contact, in charge of their own food supply, cooking, house work, brain work/education, and leisure activities (if indeed they had leisure). The amount of child care (or elder care) varies greatly from one household to another, but in any case, it’s new for many people to be providing an all-day supply of food, toilet paper (!), education, and activities around-the-clock. Weirdly, another casualty of this lockdown is, temporarily, time. It’s not that time has completely lost its meaning. Rather, how we count time has changed because of the new way we’re living. A single day can feel very long, or very short, depending on how we spend it. The silver lining in all this, for me, is time with family. Family that is usually too busy to spent much time together talking and cooking and playing and chatting during the week. My husband and I are fortunate, now, to both still work full-time remotely, and our children are staying busy with online school assignments that they complete and hand in remotely. The chores do pile up—as one of our cousins put it, the lockdown has turned us into full-time restauranteurs at home, with a teen and tween needing frequent nourishment and no restaurants, diners, or school lunches on the horizon. So yes, despite this lockdown, we are busy! Nevertheless, I think this time is one to re-assess what gives our lives meaning. Naturally, we all need to try to keep putting food on the table (literally, and in the sense of staying financially solvent). But beyond that, it’s important to have a purpose. Outside of work (housework or job-work), what motivates our days when all the busy-ness of the daily run-around goes away? For my kids, it’s been a time of renewal, in a sense. They are developing and re-discovering interests that they never had a chance to explore as much before, when they were spending most hours at school or in sports/activities. Some examples: Skateboarding. Learning pieces on the piano. Doing jigsaw puzzles. Creating a teen-oriented website. Throwing a virtual party for a friend who missed out on her birthday celebration due to the lockdown. Playing non-competitive Appleletters (a form kind of Scrabble). Baking bread, cookies, cupcakes. Preparing and serving tea with little sandwiches. (Did I mention eating was big at my house right now? Trying to avoid the "quarantine 15" though!) And for me: I have more time to reflect and to sit quietly, not having to constantly be on the move. The stress of traffic and shuttling kids and making it to in-person work meetings is relieved. Just one sign of that is that now, I’m finally getting a chance to participate in a podcast. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but couldn’t squeeze it into my schedule of full-time work, full-time parenting, and part-time writing/blogging. Recently, I was interviewed for the Stoic Psychology podcast by Alex MacLellan from London. If you have a chance, please take a listen! Alex is doing a multi-part series with my interview that also includes his own introductory thoughts, along with his book discussion, and then features selections from my conversation with him. We touched on numerous aspects of being a Stoic parent and how Stoicism can best be shared with kids, and we talked about strategies for making it through the lockdown with our sanity and our life philosophy intact. Speaking with Alex across continents felt, in a way, like a radical gesture of connection in this time of enormous interpersonal disconnecton. It reminded me that I am thankful for this Stoic community for continuing our links, our writing, our sharing, and for so many people’s efforts to forge ahead with this much-needed life philosophy in a difficult and unusual time. Fortune willing, things will brighten as spring ripens into summer.
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“Attitude is everything, take a good one where you go, It’s up to you to keep a happy mood-- And everything depends upon your attitude!” These are the lyrics of a song my older daughter learned in first grade and performed for parents and other kids. I loved it! Countless times I have sung this song to my two daughters when they were small, and I was just reminded of it again during the current coronavirus pandemic. Though the song is a bit over the top in its cheerfulness, the message rings true: Everything depends upon your attitude, especially in times of crisis. When I first heard this song, it was shortly before I began my journey into Stoicism. At the time I was investigating psychology and mindfulness. I was learning self-awareness, but there was still something missing. And for me, what was lacking was the sense of balance and reason within, and the courage to take charge of my own responses to a world that often felt cruel and unfair. I have experienced that sinking sense of the world’s cruelty since I was very young, when my dad first became sick. A kind, intelligent, and loving person, accomplished as a mathematician, Dad was in and out of medical care for years as I grew up. He died much too soon. It was a terrible thing to realize that I had no control over what happened to someone I cared about so deeply. That creeping sense of the insecurity of life is back now with the coronavirus. The virus has actively spread in my Northern California county, where residents and visitors come from all over the world to work at/with Silicon Valley tech companies. The heavily trafficked freeways have now gone largely quiet as a “shelter-in-place” order covers our region. My colleagues from work are holed up in their own remote locations, trying to limit any contact with the wider world. (It reminds me of people in Cold War bomb shelters… or under house arrest.) East Coast relatives are also staying home whenever possible, and temperatures are now being taken to enter grocery stores and offices. I’ve heard from friends in France dealing with massive lockdowns, rarely able to leave their apartments. The stories coming out of Italy right now, where we have colleagues, are sad and shocking. China seems to be improving but is far from back to normal; a coworker from there says that in the US, we are about two months or so behind that country in dealing with this. And I just heard about a college classmate in New York, a healthy marathon runner in his mid-forties, now sedated and placed on a ventilator. He is struggling to recover from Covid-19. Every day brings fresh insults—new tidbits of information that, taken in a certain way, can be very traumatizing. If you’re an admitted news junkie like me, you find yourself obsessively scrolling though stories about how the virus is affecting every aspect of life in every corner of the world. And that’s just too much information for one brain to handle. How do we determine what a reasonable risk may be in these circumstances? It may feel as if our sense of reason is askew or even broken at times. Who is to know what’s paranoid under these circumstances? Friends of mine won’t see foot outside their homes. Several have told me about elder relatives who insist on shopping, whom they are begging to stop going to Walgreens. Our kids are another issue. How to help them depends on their ages, personalities, and school circumstances. It’s a time of crisis. How much do we direct our children to do in this time, to prompt them to continue their school work remotely, in some cases without a teacher or classmates to guide them? I read an opinion piece the other day written by a mom who refused to run a “homeschool" for her third graders. She allowed them to play and watch movies. I get it! Kids need downtime and can use the break, especially if they are surrounded stress. But what if you have older students nearing high school, or ones already in high school—students who want to be sure to fulfill graduation requirements, and apply to college someday? That’s the situation I find myself in. I’m working to support my kids’ learning, while still working remotely for my full-time job. As one of my coworkers pointed out, this is a difficult time because of the high uncertainty and the lack of control we are experiencing. For those very reasons, it is the right time to practice our philosophy. Aside from the hygiene, distancing, and protective practices that can help isolate the disease, and aside from working to support our families, all we can really manage are our own attitudes. So how do we keep it all in balance? It’s not easy, and a daily emotional roller-coaster is very normal, even as an aspiring Stoic (after all, I’m not a sage!). But I am seeking to approach this rationally as best I can, and to use strategies based on a Stoic-inspired life. To keep my attitude in reasonably good shape, I have a three-fold plan:
And one more note: Please don’t hesitate to write back about how you are coping, and any advice you have during this difficult time, or to share it on social media forums or posts. Our virtual community can be a great help to those working to live out this philosophy right now! My husband and I like to tell our kids stories about times when things didn’t work out quite as well as we had hoped—in a funny way. Looking back, we realize that we could have made a better choice. But because the consequences were pretty minor, or even silly, these tales are entertaining rather than painful. They might just teach something along the way. A favorite one we harken back to happened early in our relationship, when my husband picked out a “romantic” bed and breakfast inn from a small ad on the still-young Internet, located a stone’s throw away from a national park we wanted to visit. We were excited as we drove up late at night to a large house, finally arriving after facing a ton of traffic and a longer-than-expected drive. We were soon confronted, however, with the reality that the place was far from romantic. We were ushered inside to a heavily decorated room in the basement of an older couple’s home, complete with a “Big Mouth Billy Bass” singing fish affixed to the wall, and a noisy laundry station right outside the room’s door. Clearly the wife’s “fun” retirement project, the bedroom was filled with mismatched chintz. The mistress of the house, irked at having to wait up late for us, had just one burning question: Would we like eggs and sausage or waffles and fruit for breakfast in the morning? The next day we were greeted by her in the kitchen while her husband, in a gray undershirt and little else, sat nearby watching TV, his bare feet and unclipped toenails propped up on an ottoman in full view as we tried to eat…. clearly intent on ignoring the intruders in his house. We headed into the park and took a hike that inadvertently lasted well into the dark as we rushed to find our way back without flashlights. Our stay was topped off by my husband’s scary hypothermia that evening. Good times! These kinds of tales are called “Epic Fail" stories by our daughters, who often try to run from the room instead of hearing them. They find them cringe-worthy. But the “fail” is actually the point. It’s a way of examining what we’ve done well and not so well, figuring out how we could do better, and teaching them some things to avoid too. My husband especially enjoys sharing these, and to me, they’re pretty funny, even on repetition. (I try to restrain myself from giving away the ending!) The story above, for example, contains a lot of valuable lessons. Don’t buy a singing bass fish and hang it up to decorate your new basement B&B. Another: Don’t book a room—or, much more importantly, don’t go to a school or accept a job or travel to a faraway destination—on the basis of a small, cute ad you find quickly online. Do your research! It’s a valuable takeaway: You need to do due diligence in life. And if you do, and you still find you're stuck in a basement listening to a fish singing "Don't Worry, Be Happy," do your best to laugh at it. Also: Don’t plan an 8+ mile summer hike in the mid-afternoon without quick-dry clothing or flashlights. (We have since become big fans of synthetic athletic shirts, and of starting early.) Time and experience have taught us many life lessons, and we try to share those with our children. Stories are an ideal way to do that, since they are memorable and relatable. With the distance of a few years, what was really frustrating at the time now seems funny. And the act of framing what happened to us, and our role in shaping it, is best done at a distance—looking back from a safe perch to see the full context. It's a good way to sneak in a little teaching with kids of any age... and even to remind ourselves of what to do differently next time. Socrates is famously quoted as saying, “the greatest good is daily to converse about virtue,” and “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato’s Apology). We humans do need to talk, to share our stories, to probe all our experiences and our thoughts—to understand the choices we have made and the personal tendencies and real-life situations that pull us away from virtue. We do need to examine who we are, and what we do, on a regular basis, in order to improve our understanding and our choices. (For an interesting take on these quotes, see this Vermont Philosophy blog post.) And, within reason, it is beneficial to share this practice with our children. Children, especially as they get older, need to learn how to fail, and how to get back up again after a reversal. Also, since our culture often misinforms them about what they should value and how they should behave in a tough situation, hearing a parent or trusted adult rationally review a mistake or even a difficult misfortune can teach them something, too. It's helpful to review our actions for ourselves, either in writing or in our personal thoughts. Ancient Stoics looked back to Pythagoras’ Golden Verses, where he advocated reviewing our own behavior daily: “Never allow sleep to close your eyelids, after you went to bed, Until you have examined all your actions of the day by your reason. In what have I done wrong? What have I done? What have I omitted that I ought to have done? If in this examination you find that you have done wrong, reprove yourself severely for it; And if you have done any good, rejoice.” It’s a practice I do in a sideways way, sifting through what’s on my mind through writing about my thoughts and challenges, especially by blogging. I also like jotting down a few lines of verse here and there in the evening, sometimes transforming a painful experience into a lyrical moment. This all reminds me of a favorite possession in my family. When I went to Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park several years ago, I got a baseball cap as a souvenir. The hat said “Seeker”—Harry’s position in the game of Quidditch. But for me, it held a deeper meaning. I’m constantly seeking to understand where we derive our value and moral worth, how we can examine and refine our intentions, and the way we live our lives. How we can be in harmony with our world, but also strive to bring good to our relationships and our communities. How to see things clearly in a world where emotional appeals (backed by cash) are used to constantly sell us products or even political candidates. How to cut through the noise? By seeking the truth and pursuing the virtues in our daily engagements, and by recalling our “fails” and our successes through stories. Life is messy, and that's why this process will take all of our days. But that is what being human is all about. I’ve since given the hat to my younger daughter, passing on this bit of wisdom. “If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI, 21 Reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, I get the impression of a man unafraid to be proven wrong—and quick to root out misconceptions. A man eager to learn from the world around him, yet careful in his judgments. A man who adhered to reason above the opinions of others. That’s the essence of his appeal: he strikes a chord with modern readers who still value his honesty and humanity nearly 2,000 years later. Marcus’ quote above about truth says a lot about both about his personality and his approach to living by his philosophy. As a boy, he was known at court as “Verissimus,” meaning “most truthful”—a word derived from his family name, “Verus,” meaning “true.” When he stepped up to become emperor, this nickname remained accurate. This contrasts markedly with today’s politicians and so many government authorities over the centuries. Some leaders would do anything to show that they are never wrong, including doctoring evidence, firing staff, or even eliminating opponents and watchdogs. Now that it is 2020, a major election year, it's more important than ever to become aware of what's true, what's misleading, and what's downright false. Politically-motivated twisting of the truth can happen in subtle, behind-the-scenes ways, as we are learning with patterns of online influence. Initiatives to sway people have recently tapped into research studies of basic human traits. For example, psychologists have defined a core set of “the big 5 personality traits.” One of these traits is openness, described as “the breadth, depth, originality, and complexity of an individuals’ mental and experiential life.” Other traits are conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism or emotional instability, and agreeableness. These personality traits are not meaningless trivia. Understanding them could help predict what kinds of ideas or stories will motivate or frighten certain groups of people. Personality-profiling and data company Cambridge Analytica harvested just this kind of data from millions in an effort to influence voters during the 2016 US presidential election. If we—voters, citizens, and Stoics alike—don’t take the time to search independently for truth and make our own decisions carefully, if we don’t exercise the virtues of wisdom, justice, self-control, and courage, and practice a careful assessment of our impressions, our inborn personality traits could be used against us. Bad actors may even attempt to shift our understanding of what’s true. And it is often more comfortable, and easier, to just avoid examining what's actually happening around us... especially if we feel that we benefit somehow from the status quo. Fortunately, we are not powerless against these tactics. Like Marcus, we can focus on the truth. We can drill down on information sources, read the fine print, and look at what might be driving the agendas of those feeding us their ideas and arguments. Stoic thought emphasizes that we can use our rational understanding and choice (something humans are uniquely endowed with) to shape our behavior in the world. From a Stoic perspective, we are not merely pawns of our personalities, of electoral politics, or of the entities designed to exploit our traits for their own gain. We are born with a sense of reason that allows us to choose the path of truth-seeking and moral character. We owe it to ourselves to exercise that sense wisely. Undoubtedly, Marcus himself had an enormously “broad, deep, original and complex” personality, both inside and out. It’s a life that has inspired leaders and thoughtful people ever since. And to me, it’s something to aspire to. Originally published in The STOIC magazine. Explore the current issue and subscribe here. “The history of life.” The topic sounds limitless. How can anyone hope to understand the entire history of life on Earth? What does that even mean? Sounds as tough as becoming a Stoic sage. But in fact, scientists know a lot about how life has developed and changed over time. Learning about the winding path of living things on our planet has been a longtime passion of mine. And these days, I’m drawing on it to ground my perspective on my own life. It’s a helpful way to supplement my Stoic-inspired life philosophy when I get wrapped up in “first-world problems.” My interest began in 6th grade, when my teacher, Ms. Cox, showed us grainy videos (old school VHS tapes, or maybe Betamax?) featuring Donald Johanson and Louis and Mary Leakey talking about their search for the earliest humans. Johanson discovered the fossilized skeleton of “Lucy,” an early human-like hominid, in Ethiopia. The Leakeys also found very old hominid fossils in Africa. My all-time favorite elementary school project was creating a giant mural of horses in the style of cave paintings found in Southwest France, some of the earliest art created by prehistoric humans. It thrilled me to think that I might be using the same techniques of a very, very, VERY ancient version of me. I learned a lot more about life’s history in college. As a freshman, one of the first classes I signed up for was, in fact, titled “The History of Life.” I thought it sounded a little ambitious, and I was right. But it was also fascinating, and gave me a whole new perspective. The course was taught by Stephen Jay Gould, a legendary paleontologist and theorist of evolution. Though I never got to know him personally in the large lecture class, Gould inspired me with his ability to write eloquent essays about life’s origins even in the very tiniest and most obscure of creatures, for instance during the Cambrian explosion 541 million years ago (a massive diversification of life that lasted for 13 to 25 million years). Gould’s lectures also opened my eyes to a new way of looking at evolution. He argued that rather than gradually changing, living creatures exist in “punctuated equilibrium.” Things remain in relative stasis until something radical happens and the species begin to quickly shift, a punctuation mark in time. It’s hard to capture the awe I felt when I understood how very long life had been striving—and to some extent, thriving, but also struggling, and dying—on our planet. Humans are newcomers on the scene. And this is a scene that’s been through unimaginable, often very rapid change. (Gould died in 2002, but his inspiration remains… in part, I owe my current career in science writing to him.) This year, I’ve gone back to Gould’s books to help me put things into perspective once again as the norms and ethics of our society seem to be bent or broken everywhere I turn. The virtues that I hold dear—the Stoic virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation—are being ripped to shreds daily. Every week seems to reveal a fresh scandal, whether it is in government, corporate leadership, Hollywood, or law enforcement. Our human equilibrium is being “punctuated” by changes in our physical climate, too. In a way, learning about the pre-historic and deep past—a time before modern language and recorded thought—is a new kind of the “View from Above” meditation. This Stoic technique encourages practitioners to imagine themselves high above their street, city, or state, to float over things is to see them from a new perspective. From that point of view, our numerous problems seem small and inconsequential. So when I am bothered by things around me, I don’t try to escape to the past so much as immerse myself in the timeline of this long history. The past is more than “another country,” as it’s been called—it’s a whole other version of our universe. I can envision a long line of beings living and breathing and working together and fighting and loving and competing. A line constantly shifting and changing. Marcus Aurelius wrote of this concept in his Meditations. For example: "At all times some things are hastening to come into being, and others to be no more; and of that which is coming to be, some part is already extinct. Flux and transformation are forever renewing the world, as the ever-flowing stream of time makes boundless eternity forever young.” (6:15) As I review what we humans have experienced over the "ever-flowing stream of time," I think not just of people alone but also the megafauna (mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giant ground sloths, and more) that they encountered. These creatures, long extinct, once made our bodies seem tiny... and stand in great contrast to the microscopic ones that started it all. Getting to know more about this past could also help us move towards the Stoic goal of "living in accord with Nature." The largeness of time and space, and the variation of life and the natural world, are a remarkable heritage. If we see all this in the light of the vastness of the cosmos, it's something to marvel at... and a means to meditate on where we have been, and where we would like to go. Ultimately, this is another way to work to increase our own human flourishing in a world not made just for us. Do you ever wish you could just KNOW what to say to your kids to guide and support them? Lately, when I’m trying to help one of my daughters by saying something I think is supportive or giving some gentle guidance, it doesn't seem to go so well. I don’t blame them for their frustrated responses. It’s all about perspective and how you interpret what’s being said. For example, saying “You’re doing so well, that’s great!” when we were doing an athletic activity together sounded to my daughter like: “You’re a little kid who needs to be told how good she is.” She asked, “Why are you so surprised I can do this? You don’t have to tell me that.” Good point. And I’m glad to see she wasn’t waiting for/dependent on my praise to know she’s got things covered. “You’re kind of talking to me like a baby,” was her other comment. I know that for her, acting like a “baby” is probably one of the worst insults a person could throw at her. So I stopped to think. Maybe I hadn’t evolved how I talked to her to really meet her age, level, and self-reliant character? And when I try to provide a little coaching about simple things like vocabulary words or piano practice, I get pushback. I thought I was helping. But I can see that my lessons on independence for my kids have actually sunk in, to the point where they really don't want that kind of intervention. In general, my advice and “help” are not what my kids need to understand how they should think or feel about things. My daughters are in middle and high school now. They have to go through their own process of examining their impressions and discerning the right choices. They are of an age to internalize the lessons that I’ve shared with them about how to understand the world without blinders on—about how to question knee-jerk reactions and groupthink—and about striving towards virtues and moral guideposts such as courage, wisdom, justice, and self-control. So my parenting now has to focus on teaching (and reinforcing) the PROCESS for how to navigate their world. It's a process that can enable teens to live without focusing exclusively on misguided externals, and to think through their choices using their "spark of reason" and good judgment. You remember when you were taught to "Stop, Drop, and Roll" if you smelled smoke or a fire? The process is kind of like that, it just happens in our minds rather than our bodies as we respond to the world around us. Stop, drop, and question your impressions. Stop, drop, and tune into your reason and your ruling center, the part of your brain designed to help you navigate away from a deadly fire. Except instead of a fire, we're coping with an unhealthy emotion, or irrational belief, or any thought that just isn't in sync with reality and the nature of the universe. Then, you can ask yourself: Is what I want to do next next wise, fair, brave, and common-sensical? Does it help others, not just me? Does it help me become the kind of person I want to be? Or does it just serve my own ego and my own biases? These questions are a good place to start. It is undeniably hard for fast-moving children, but as they get older, they can begin to shape a well-informed process. And as I remind my daughters, a kind of shorthand for this: "Don't believe everything you think." We can model that process in our own lives, and in how we talk through our own everyday activities and decision-making. None of this is simple for adults either! Personally, I find that I often let doubts creep in about choices… so I stay vigilant about what I say and do to undermine my own process. Encouraging this process is analogous to our schools trying to teach students HOW to analyze and think for themselves, not WHAT to think or just memorize. Critical thinking and questioning are what philosophy is all about—we can recall how Socrates encouraged these things in his followers and students, and then Epictetus, and many other ancient philosophers. Don't wait for a teacher to guide you, Epictetus said: Once you've mastered the basic ideas for how to live, just go out there and do it. And the same holds for adults, too. As much as we might like to KNOW what to do, we cannot ask our philosophy for ALL the answers, written out for us to follow. Ultimately we all need to cultivate a powerful ruling center to help make choices, and to live with the choices we have made. And that's hard! There's just no way to know all the ideal choices, all the right ways to approach our complex world. We have freedom, and we must make the best of it even when it feels like a tough burden to navigate our lives. Philosophy helps us find illuminated checkpoints in the fog... but the fog remains. Even Stoic role models such as Marcus Aurelius would probably have been the first to admit that they didn’t know everything. And I think they would have been careful to avoid giving unwanted or unwarranted advice. Can you picture Socrates telling you which car to buy? Or which job to apply for? No life philosophy is a decision tree showing specific steps. There's no flow chart with spelled-out answers for always doing the right thing. Anything that proscriptive would not allow people to be individuals, to think for themselves, or to get to know their own ruling center. Instead, our life philosophy should equip us to discern the path towards eudaimonia... and with that process, we can bring a conscious, thoughtful faculty of choice to our decision-making, avoiding fires and other dangers along the way. |
About The Stoic MomI'm a writer, editor, and mom to two daughters in Northern California on a journey to discover how Stoic philosophy and mindful approaches can change a parent's - or any person's - life. Categories
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