Winning the Stoic Test: How to Stay Positive during Pandemic

The past 20 years I’ve studied Stoicism and Buddhism (the stuff they don’t teach you at school). One interesting perspective I recently came across is ‘the stoic test’ (I found it in the book by William Irvine: the stoic challenge).

In our lives, we often experience setbacks. These challenges can be small (something breaks, we get into a fight, it’s raining so we can’t go outside) or big (Corona happens, your company goes bankrupt, somebody dies).?

We can see all of these setbacks as ‘tests’ by the Stoic Gods. They test us to see whether we can avoid negative emotions, stay balanced and take positive action to improve upon the setback. This requires us to look from a tranquil, detached place. And it trains us to deal with ‘things happening’ around us. Do we make a drama, resist the situation OR do we stay put, calm and just proceed with what’s next?

The past months, the Stoic gods put me up for some interesting tests. First, they announced that my mum would need to get seriously ill in the middle of the Corona period (this was the end of 2020). Next, they blocked any possibility of letting me fly back to the Netherlands to see my mum (with travel restrictions and giving my mum enough fear to announce she wouldn’t even want to get close to me if I’d come). Finally in June, they allowed me to fly back to my home country, only to put me up with the next test: Indonesia closing its borders unless you’re vaccinated. Initially, that included my 8 year old, but they went ‘easy’ on us: only my 13 year old’s and me and my wife HAD TO get the vaccine. Meanwhile, they decided to make many of my team members in Jakarta ill, which impacts my business quite a bit. That was after they locked down India where my Bridge team resides.?

The Buddhists have the concept of equanimity: to stay calm in any situation. They see ‘things’ (anything that happens) as ‘neutral’. It becomes ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ only by the labels we put on them. The stoics have an additional concept that differentiates between ‘things we can control’ and ‘things we can’t control’.?

The interesting part of the stoic test is to see the above story as multiple tests thrown my way. In any situation, they challenge me to choose my reaction and practice what I’ve learned. The latest test was around vaccination; I didn’t necessarily want to get a vaccine and had not even thought of giving it to my children. When the gods announced I had to make a choice: stay in the Netherlands and evade the vaccine or comply with the new regulations in Indonesia, of course I got a bit upset. I started thinking about the world in a more negative light, and kept thinking about my ‘problem’. After a while I realized that I was being tested, so I decided to regain my equanimity. It’s merely ‘something that happened in the flow of life’. What I could control was putting that needle in my and my kid’s arm. What I could not control was the consequences of either choice: if I didn’t do it, I would need to stay. If I did do it, maybe there’d be side effects later on. I decided to ‘just do it’ and then move on.?

The next challenge was actually returning to Indonesia. I don’t have a house anymore in the Netherlands and we need to wait until the end of august for everyone’s vaccine to be ‘official’. First I resisted this, because I enjoy my life on Bali. But then I decided to see it as a challenge to become more flexible: to find a place to live here, to find activities with the kids and get into some sort of work rhythm again (never mind the 5 hours time difference). That’s how I ended up in a biological garden, harvesting vegetables with my kids.?

Staying equanimous is a challenge. And I’ve also learned that sometimes it’s okay to be out of balance. The key is to regain it soon and not get stuck in negative thoughts. The only way is forward. And positive thoughts help you, negative thoughts simply don’t.?

It’s easy in the current moment to feel negative. There are so many things happening in the world: people fall sick and die, governments are imposing rules that go against your comfort or sense of freedom, the media are showing us everything that’s wrong today, business gets hurt and on and on and on. Now almost all of those things are beyond our control. The stoics advise us not to worry about things we can’t control. We should focus on things we CAN control. What we CAN control are our thoughts. Do we see things as neutral or do we worry? Do we focus on all the stuff that goes wrong in the world or on the possibilities to create the future we want? Do we stay in fear of falling sick or do we work hard to eat, exercise and sleep well??

Try it yourself: write down what’s happening in your life today that’s impacting how you feel and go about your day. Describe it in a neutral way. And then imagine this being a test by the gods. They’re testing your resilience, your positivity, your ability to create the future you want, your strength to help people around you. Looking at this as a test, what response can you give? What can you change in your life? What can you do to move in the right direction?