I really love the Stoic analogy that describes a human life, and its relationship to ‘fate’, as being like the life of a dog leashed to a cart as it trundles its way along. The idea is that the dog has a certain amount of freedom to move around, explore and control what it does but this activity occurs within the constraints of the length of the dog’s leash and the relentless movement and path taken by the cart, which the dog has no control over whatsoever. Similarly, we have a certain amount of freedom to go about our business but this is all within the context and constraints of wherever fate leads us. We can never know whether the cart will turn onto a different path, enter difficult terrain, slow down or speed up or even tumble headlong over a cliff edge.
I was thinking about this analogy a lot on a long run yesterday morning. In particular, I was thinking about what we can do to increase our freedom – to increase the scope of our control over life. By definition, within this analogy, we have no control over the cart. It is tempting to think that we might be able to influence the route it takes or the speed it travels at but the whole point is that we are not driving and nothing we do has any influence on the driver. Accepting this leaves two areas for consideration. First, there is the ease and guile with which we move over the terrain around the cart. Secondly, there is the length of the leash (or its flexibility). However, on reflection, I think we have to regard the leash as being ‘owned’ by the cart and so not under our control. Thus, leading a successful life is really all about maximising your ability to move around the terrain that is within the reach of your leash, bearing in mind that all the time you are being shifted along by the cart. We have to become more agile, more skillful, more resilient, faster and have more stamina.
I also got to thinking about how the people that we share our life with are also on their own leashes, attached to their own carts. This means that we cannot assume that their carts and our cart will stay on the same path. For a time the carts may share a road, and for that period we may be able to run around on our leash with them exploring the terrain we encounter, but clearly we cannot assume that it will always be so. We may decide to trot along together and do everything that we can to maintain our connectedness but ultimately one cart may veer off the shared path and the tug of our leashes may not allow us to stay together.
It’s also interesting to think about what it means to build something over time. Within this analogy we could only build something substantial in our life if we can engineer things so that we can spend a significant amount of time in the same space. This means that we need to be fast enough to run ahead of the cart to start the building process and can keep building for as long as the cart doesn’t catch up and pull so far ahead that we are dragged away from our construction. So to build something significant we need to be able to move quickly relative to the cart (to get ahead of it) and to move around fast enough to be able to draw together the resources that we need in the limited time available to us. I guess we could also carry whatever it is that we are building with us along the journey. In that instance I think that what we would actually be doing is building ourselves or something within us (skills, attributes) that we can deploy wherever we happen to be and with or for whoever we happen to be there with.
One way or another then, this analogy points to the need for agility (which to me combines speed, skill and guile) and stamina. I think agility comes in different flavours – physical and mental. We can hone both our agility and our stamina through exercise, developing our skill and technique and becoming more aware and knowledgeable about both ourselves and of the terrain around us. Finally, we also need resilience because it is inevitable that our cart will take us away from where we think we want to be at times and if we react negatively when this happens then we will waste time and energy on regret and despondency when we feel the leash tighten and tug on us as, inevitably, we will. Far better to accept that the leash is pulling us in some direction and focus on how to make that work than to strain painfully at the leash and be dragged to that other place anyway.
[Before writing this entry I tried to look up this dog and cart analogy so that I could give it its proper attribution but it seems as though it is something that multiple Stoic philosophers wrote about. If I had looked a bit harder and a bit deeper I might have found the original source, but I could sense my leash beginning to tighten and I had to move on!]
Tim O'Hare 