Get to know yourself, your talents and your natural affinities. By accepting life’s limits and inevitabilities and working with them rather than fighting them, we become free.” “Freedom comes from understanding the limits of our power and the natural limits set in place by divine providence. The quicker we accept this, the more tranquil we can be.” “For good or for ill, life and nature are governed by laws that we can’t change. To live in accordance with nature begins with accepting our natural limitations – inherent and circumstantial. *** Rule 1: Focus on what is within your power. They are growing and changing in an effort to reach the ultimate goal for a human being.”īelow are six rules to help and guide you to live every day in accordance with nature according to the Stoics. “’Human Nature’ refers to the condition of a human who is expressing the very best in his or her development, that is their ultimate ‘best self’. Michel Dew, a Stoic scholar, defined what the Stoics meant in the following way in what might be one of the best description: For reason supervenes to shape impulse scientifically.” As Diogenes Laertius described it in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers: “… when reason by way of a more perfect leadership has been bestowed on the beings we call rational, for them life according to reason rightly becomes the natural life. It was our reasoning power, the great gift from nature, that separated us from unthinking animals. What? Human nature is selfish and impulsive-this Stoic prescription will lead to chaos! But what the Stoics had in mind was something above our natural base impulses. This always sounds strange to any reader who picks up Stoicism.

If we follow Nature, all is easy and unobstructed but if we combat Nature, our life differs not a whit from that of men who row against the current.” In another instance Seneca defines ‘living according to nature’ as the motto of the Stoic school. Another Stoic, Seneca, put it this way: “Let us keep to the way which Nature has mapped out for us, and let us not swerve therefrom. Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius put it this way in Meditations: “Philosophy requires only what your nature already demands.” The founder of Stoicism, Zeno, sweepingly defined nature as “the way things work,” and wisdom as acting in accordance with natural laws. Open any Stoic thinker and you’ll find the instruction to live according to nature.

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