Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 119: The Stoics, the winter, the dead

It’s the end of week as we knew it, amicis.  Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. 

Listen to the Three Things podcast, episode 119:

 

                           

1. The Stoics 

“But, you ask, if a wise man receives a blow, what shall he do?” the Stoic philosopher Seneca asked in an essay written almost 2,000 years ago. He answered himself: “What Cato did when he was struck in the face. He did not flare up, he did not avenge the wrong, he did not even forgive it, but he said that no wrong had been done.”*

The “struck in the face” part feels very 2023. It’s a big part of the first round of the NHL playoffs, striking in the face is. I’m picturing the padded punches to the kisser in scrums after the whistle that the cameras love, the face washes as they are euphemistically called. This is where Stoicism has something to teach the players—and to teach us all. 

“So, and I’m not the authority on this,” said our son Alex, “but to my understanding, it’s an ancient philosophy, particularly coming from the ancient Romans that essentially holds that living virtuously is the path to the happy life. Behaving well is what matters.”

Alex studied classics at the University of Alberta. He studied hockey at KC Twin Arenas. Stoicism, he said, teaches a kind of self-sufficiency, an insulation, even in the face of pain.  Especially in the face of pain and insult.

“It’s important to keep a level head and stick to the game plan, don’t complain about the penalty calls, put your head down and play,” he said. “And, also, if you don’t act that way, the opposition can get in your head a lot. A lot of teams try to do that—they play physically or after the whistle there are scrums or they chirp you just to try to get in your head and knock you off your game.”

Photo: Rod Maldaner

You don’t score stoically, and you don’t have a stoic powerplay. Your goaltender is never praised for stoicism between the pipes. But hockey isn’t just a game of athletic skill. It’s a game of pain management. Pain and injury in this life are what the Stoics were good—are good—at. Does it hurt to get punched in the face when the referee isn’t looking? Yes. Is it possible to stop yourself, now that the referee is watching, from punching back and putting the other team on the powerplay? Yes. Is it easy to think team first? No, but, as Seneca also asks, is the path by which we are called to go steep and rugged? But what of it, he continues, can the heights be reached by a level path? 

All these centuries later, it turns out there are ancient currents everywhere under the ice. Fortune often smiles on the team that can earn the Rome-ice advantage. 

2. The winter 

In the beginning, my bicycle helped me get away. To Bing’s, the corner store, for hockey cards. To the big field at St. Francis on 66 Street to kick field goals through the uprights that used to be there. To a place called Honda Hills out past Gainers and the stockyards that was a BMX park before there were BMX bikes or BMX parks. Later, I got further away on my bike. To Jasper, to Banff, up the Sunshine Coast and down Vancouver Island. Still later, and further still, I pedalled across the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis in the cold. In the colder still, Shelagh and I rode bikes to Red Square. And through the real cold, polar vortex cold, to St. Patrick’s Island in Calgary where friends helped haul the Doc’s cargo bike retrofitted as a coffee-maker-on-wheels up a hill where he made coffee for winter cyclists from around the world. 

Calgary, Moscow, Minneapolis, and Montréal, too, these were cities we visited for the Winter Cycling Congress. If winter and cycling don’t necessarily go together for you, they didn’t for me either. As a boy, my bike was put away for the winter. Winter was for plowing through in an automobile or trudging through on foot or overheating and overcrowding through on a bus. It’s an old story. Seneca says the wise man endures misfortunes in the same way he submits to the rigours of winter and to inclement weather. At the winter cycling conferences, that stoic storyline got deconstructed. It got dented by some Epicurus: Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance. Listening to Timo, Pekka, Angela, Michele, Anders, Isla, Tony, Bartek and the rest of the joyful winter cycling pantheon presented the possibility that winter doesn’t have to be sat out or survived or complained through. It can be safely pedalled into. The Winter Cycling Congresses that we have been to have shown me the way to be at home. 

Last week came word that the next conference happens in February in, of all places, Edmonton. Too cold here in February? Not if you're out there on your bike with your friends. That’s what we call here your basic warm cold. 

3. The dead 

I’ve been sitting alone quietly reading in the MacEwan Library these days. That’s where I dug up the little red-covered Loeb Classics edition of Seneca’s Moral Essays. I used to think that the rule of silence in a library helped others concentrate on what they were reading. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Sit for hours amid stacks of books in a library and you get why silence is proper. It’s about respect for the dead. What a marvellous morgue a library is. Texts in spined containers tagged and arranged and sitting, waiting to be recalled to life by the reader. It feels right to be reverent in the presence of an author’s corpus. Long live the dead. 

Thanks for being out there, friends.
 
* Footnote from Alex on Seneca: “One of the criticisms of Seneca is, it’s easy for him to say, oh, yeah, everything is fine, take things as they come, when he was one of the wealthiest people in the world. Easy for him to say. Harder for someone on the streets of Rome trying to make ends meet, right?”