“Be harsh with yourself at times.” ~ Seneca from Letters from a Stoic
Again, Stoics were pretty bad-ass peeps. They weren’t messing around with living virtuously! And, in this case, we’ve got Seneca reminding us that, AT TIMES, we need to be harsh with ourselves.
This does NOT mean, of course, that we need to go around like that albino monk from The da Vinci Code mutilating ourselves (ew). But it DOES mean that, at times, we need to give ourselves a zen stick to the head and wake up from the bad habits that are dragging us down.
As with the virtuous mean chat above, there’s a virtuous mean here. TOO MUCH harshness is destructive--we’ll develop a sense of self-loathing that’s a weakness. Aristotle would consider it a vice of excess. TOO LITTLE harshness on the other hand, and we’re a self-contented (and usually self-righteous) ass. That would be a vice of deficiency.
The virtuous mean rests right there in the middle path--where we’re appropriately correcting our weaknesses WITHOUT self-criticism per se, just a nice firm look in the eye and zen stuck whack to the head with a smile as we embody more and more of our ideals while burning out, as Rumi would say, the dross that clouds the silver.
Rumi: “This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross. This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away.”
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