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The Stoic Seneca is the master of the ‘consolation’, a letter written for the express purpose of comforting someone who has been bereaved. Seneca wrote at least three consolations, to Marcia, to Polybius, and to Helvia. In the Consolation to Helvia, he comforts his own mother Helvia on ‘losing’ him to exile—an unusual case, and literary innovation, of the lamented consoling the lamenter.

The emperor Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE) had at least fourteen children with his wife Faustina, but only four daughters and one unfortunate son, Commodus, outlived their parents. In the Meditations, Marcus likens his children to leaves, and paraphrases Homer in the Iliad: 

Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines.

Marcus was a Stoic, and would have known, at least in principle, how to cope with grief, loss, and bereavement. But if Seneca could have consoled Marcus on the loss of his children, and could only have told him three things, what might those three things have been?

First, Marcus, remember that life is given to us with death as a precondition. Some people die sooner than others, but life, on a cosmic scale, is so short that, really, it makes no difference. Even children are known to die—indeed, they often do—and these, Marcus, simply happened to be your own. A human life, however long or short, or great or small, is of little historical and no cosmic consequence. Since a life can never be long or great enough, the most that it can be is sufficient, and we would do better to concentrate on what that might mean.

Second, it may be that death is in fact preferable to life (the secret of Silenus). Life is full of suffering, and grieving only adds to it, whereas death is the permanent release from every possible pain. Indeed, many people who have died—think only of our friend Cicero—would have died happier if they had died sooner. If we do not pity the unborn, why should we pity the dead, who at least had the benefit, if benefit it is, of having existed? The unborn cry out as soon as they are delivered into the world, but to the dead we never have to block our ears. If weep we must, it is not over death, but the whole of life, that we should weep.

Third, we should treat the people we love not as permanent possessions but as temporary loans from fortune. When, in the evening, you kiss your wife and children goodnight, reflect on the possibility that they, and you, might never wake up. In the morning when you kiss them goodbye, reflect on the possibility that they, or you, might never come home. That way you’ll be better prepared for their eventual loss, and, what’s more, savour and sublime whatever time that you have with them—and, in that way, lead them to love you more. 

If you do lose a loved one, do not grieve, or no more than is appropriate, or no more than they would have wanted you to, but be grateful for the moments that you shared, and consider how much poorer your life would have been if they had never come into it.

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Confidence derives from the Latin fidere, “to trust.” To be confident is to trust and have faith in the world. To be self-confident is to trust and have faith in oneself, and, in particular, in one’s ability to engage successfully or at least adequately with the world. A self-confident person is able to act on opportunities, take on new challenges, rise to difficult situations, engage with constructive criticism, and shoulder responsibility if and when things go wrong.

Self-confidence and self-esteem often go hand in hand, but they aren’t one and the same thing. In particular, it is possible to be highly self-confident and yet to have profoundly low self-esteem, as is the case, for example, with many performers and celebrities, who are able to play to studios and galleries but then struggle behind the scenes. Esteem derives from the Latin aestimare [to appraise, value, rate, weigh, estimate], and self-esteem is our cognitive and, above all, emotional appraisal of our own worth. More than that, it is the matrix through which we think, feel, and act, and reflects and determines our relation to our self, to others, and to the world.

People with healthy self-esteem do not need to prop themselves up with externals such as income, status, or notoriety, or lean on crutches such as alcohol, drugs, or sex (when these things are a crutch). On the contrary, they treat themselves with respect and look after their health, community, and environment. They are able to invest themselves completely in projects and people because they have no fear of failure or rejection. Of course, like everybody, they suffer hurt and disappointment, but their setbacks neither damage nor diminish them. Owing to their resilience, they are open to people and possibilities, tolerant of risk, quick to joy and delight, and accepting and forgiving of others and themselves.

So what’s the secret to self-esteem? As I argue in Heaven and Hell, a book on the psychology of the emotions, many people find it easier to build their self-confidence than their self-esteem, and, conflating one with the other, end up with a long list of talents and achievements. Rather than facing up to the real issues, they hide, often their whole life long, behind their certificates and prizes. But as anyone who has been to university knows, a long list of talents and achievements is no substitute for healthy self-esteem. While these people work on their list in the hope that it might one day be long enough, they try to fill the emptiness inside them with externals such as status, income, possessions, and so on. Undermine their standing, criticize their home or car, and observe in their reaction that it is them that you undermine and criticize.

Similarly, it is no use trying to pump up the self-esteem of children (and, increasingly, adults) with empty, undeserved praise. The children are unlikely to be fooled, but may instead be held back from the sort of endeavour by which real self-esteem can grow. And what sort of endeavour is that? Whenever we live up to our dreams and promises, we can feel ourselves growing. Whenever we fail but know that we have given it our best, we can feel ourselves growing. Whenever we stand up for our values and face the consequences, we can feel ourselves growing. This is what growth depends on. Growth depends on living up to our ideals, not our parents’ ambitions for us, or the targets of the company we work for, or anything else that is not truly our own but, instead, a betrayal of ourselves.

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7 ideas for being more in the moment

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The hardest thing to see, said Friedrich Schiller, is what is in front of your eyes.

Gardening is more and more recognized, and now even prescribed by doctors, for its health benefits, including reduced stress, anxiety, and depression.

How might gardening, and nature more generally (including animals), help with mental health? To various degrees, we live inside the stories we tell ourselves. But gardening drags us out of our tortured heads and back into the natural world, which blunts the ideological and emotional extremes to which detached, abstract thought is prone.

In the Philosophy of Existence (1938), Karl Jaspers described this disinterested process of looking outside oneself—or “phenomenology”, as it is sometimes called—as “a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me.”

Just picture the gardener’s pure and simple delight at the first crocuses or tulips, a bird’s nest, a swarm of bees… When we stop noticing small things, we are no longer truly alive.

The word “phenomena” derives from the Ancient Greek meaning “things that appear”, and phenomenology can be defined as the direct examination and description of phenomena as they are consciously experienced.

Pioneered by Edmund Husserl (1859-1939) as a philosophical tool, phenomenology involves paying close attention to objects and their relations so that they begin to reveal themselves, not as we take them to be, but as they truly appear to naked human consciousness, shorn of superimposed theories and preconceptions. Pick out an object, plant, or animal, look at it, and then keep on looking for much longer than you normally would. Vision, said the painter James Ensor, changes as it observes.

As a method, phenomenology enables us to study not only the phenomena themselves, but also, by extension, the very structures of human experience and consciousness. This is not quite the same as mindfulness, and, unlike mindfulness, phenomenology has not yet seeped into popular consciousness.

Mindfulness, which derives from Buddhist spiritual practice, aims at increasing our awareness and acceptance of incoming thoughts and feelings, and so the flexibility or fluidity of our responses, which become less like unconscious reactions and more like conscious reflections. Phenomenology, in contrast, is more explicitly outward-looking—and, I think, much easier to practice.

Phenomenological activities such as wine tasting, gardening, and bird watching remove us from our stifled selves and return us to the world that we came from, reconnecting us with something much greater and higher than our personal problems and preoccupations.

In that much, phenomenology can, quite literally, bring us back to life.

Without further ado, and as promised, here are 7 ideas for being more in the moment:

1. Start small and make it regular. For example, aim to go for a half-hour nature walk each day. Go no matter what, even if you’re busy or it’s raining. Having to go for a daily walk is one of the best things about owning a dog. People enjoy the disconnect of having to walk the dog—because, actually, it’s the dog that’s walking them.

2. Make a change to your routine. Born in Königsberg in 1724, the philosopher Immanuel Kant was renowned for his strict routines. His neighbors could tell the time by his daily walks and even nicknamed him “the Clock of Königsberg”. He died in 1804, having in all his 79 years seldom left the city’s precincts. When we are too set in our routine, we tend to take our surroundings for granted. This actually helped Kant, enabling him to live inside his head and become the abstract philosopher that he became. But for most of us, it can grow into a problem. By making small changes to our routine or surroundings, for example, going for an early morning walk, putting a pitcher of tulips on the kitchen table, we naturally notice things more. It’s a bit like traveling, but on a smaller scale.

3. Simplify your life. When we are anxious or stressed, we tend to focus on our worries at the expense of the world around us. But the more we focus on our worries, the more stressed and anxious we become, setting up a vicious cycle. We can bring down stress and anxiety and break that vicious cycle by cutting out certain things, even if that means doing less or doing only one thing at a time. At the very least, we need to make sure that we are getting adequate sleep and exercise, and that we are making the time, every so often, to do the things that we enjoy.

4. Practice deep breathing. In the shorter term, we can alleviate stress and anxiety (and even physical pain, as anyone who’s been through childbirth knows) by regulating our breathing: Breathe in through your nose and hold the air in for several seconds. Then purse your lips and gradually let the air out, making sure that you let out as much air as you can. Continue doing this until you are feeling much more relaxed. Try it now, it’ll only take a couple of minutes—and, I promise, you’ll notice the difference.

5. Cultivate idleness. There’s a very fine divide between idleness and boredom. Most animals dislike boredom, but man, says writer Colin Wilson, “is tormented by it”. Boredom can open the shutters on some very uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, which we normally block out with a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts and feelings. We are, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “always giving parties to cover the silence”. But idleness, and even boredom, also have important upsides.

Here’s one of my favourite Zen jokes:

A Zen student went to a temple and asked how long it would take him to gain enlightenment if he joined the temple.

“Ten years,” said the Zen master.

“Well, how about if I work really hard and double my effort?”

“Twenty years.”

The more we rush, the less we contemplate; and the less we contemplate, the less we understand. Time is a very strange thing, and not at all linear: sometimes, the best way of using it is to “waste” it.

6. Savour. Make an effort to enjoy whatever it is that you’re doing. For example, when it comes to your main meal of the day, don’t just lean at the counter and scoff it down lukewarm. Give it a bit of love and care, even if you’re eating alone. Turn off the TV, set the table, dim the lights, and make a moment to feel grateful. Wine lovers don’t just swallow their wine, they admire its hue, swirl it around in the glass, close their eyes and breathe it in deeply…

7. Focus on the process more than on the purpose, especially when it comes to repetitive, mundane tasks like cooking and gardening. When you paint a picture or write a book, it is there for ever (and isn’t that just amazing?). But when you mow the lawn you have to do it all over again in just a few days’ time. The gardener is like Sisyphus, the mythological king made to repeat for all eternity the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, the philosopher Albert Camus concludes: “The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognizing and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

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A philosophical cure for fear and anxiety

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“Anxiety” said the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, “is the dizziness of freedom.” What could he have meant by that?

Anxiety can be defined as “a state consisting of psychological and physical symptoms brought about by a sense of apprehension at a perceived threat.”

Fear is similar to anxiety, except that with fear, the threat is, or is perceived to be, more concrete, present, or imminent.

Fear and anxiety can, of course, be a normal response to life experiences, protective mechanisms that have evolved to prevent us from entering into potentially dangerous situations and to help us escape from them should they befall us regardless.

For example, anxiety can prevent us from coming into close contact with disease-carrying or poisonous animals, such as rats, snakes, and spiders, from engaging with a much stronger or angrier enemy, and even from declaring our undying love to someone who is unlikely to spare our feelings.

If we do find ourselves caught in a potentially dangerous situation, the fight-or-flight response triggered by fear can help us to mount an appropriate response by priming our body for action and increasing our performance and stamina.

In short, the purpose of fear and anxiety is to protect us from harm and, above all, to preserve us from death—whether literal or figurative, biological or psychosocial.

On the other hand, severe or inappropriate anxiety can be maladaptive, preventing us from doing the sorts of things that most people take for granted, such as leaving the house or even our bedroom. I once treated a patient with an anxiety disorder who, to avoid ever having to leave his bedroom, urinated into a bottle and defaecated into a plastic bag.

Such pathological anxiety is very common and often presents in one or more distinct patterns or syndromes, such as phobia, panic disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

As with the adaptive forms, these pathological forms of anxiety can be interpreted in terms of life and death. Common phobias such as arachnophobia (spiders), ophidiophobia (snakes), acrophobia (heights), achluophobia (darkness), and brontophobia (storms) are all for the sorts of dangers that commonly threatened our ancestors. Today, man-made hazards such as motor cars and electric cables are much more likely to strike us, but most phobias remain for natural dangers, presumably because man-made hazards are too recent to have imprinted themselves onto our genome.

Panic disorder involves recurrent panic attacks during which symptoms of anxiety are so severe that the person fears that he or she is suffocating, having a heart attack, or losing control. Very soon, the person develops a fear of the panic attacks themselves, which in turn sets off further panic attacks. A vicious cycle takes hold, with the panic attacks becoming ever more frequent and severe and even occurring “out of the blue.”

As with phobias, the ulterior fear in panic disorder is of death and dying, as it is also with PTSD, which is a reaction to a traumatic life event, such as a car crash or physical or sexual assault. Common symptoms of PTSD include anxiety, of course, but also numbing, detachment, flashbacks, nightmares, and loss of memory for the traumatic event.

The symptoms of PTSD vary significantly from one culture to another, so much so that PTSD is sometimes thought of as a “culture-bound syndrome.” Culture-bound syndromes are essentially culture-specific anxiety disorders, which, again, like all anxiety disorders, can easily be understood in terms of life and death.

Dhat, for example, seen in South Asian men, involves a sudden fear about the loss of semen in the urine, whitish discoloration of the urine, and sexual dysfunction, accompanied by feelings of weakness and exhaustion. Dhat may be rooted in the old Hindu belief that it takes 40 drops of blood to create a drop of bone marrow, and 40 drops of bone marrow to create a drop of semen, and thus that semen is a concentrated essence of life.

In addition to fear and anxiety and their pathological forms (such as phobias, panic disorder, etc.), there is a more abstract or philosophical form of anxiety that has been called “existential anxiety.” While fear and anxiety and their pathological forms are grounded in threats to life, existential anxiety is rooted in the brevity and apparent meaninglessness or absurdity of life, that is, in a kind of metaphorical death.

As I argue in my new book, Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions, existential anxiety is so disturbing that most people avoid it at all costs, constructing a false reality out of goals, aspirations, habits, customs, values, culture, and religion in a bid to deceive themselves that their lives are special and meaningful and that death is distant or delusory.

Unfortunately, such self-deception comes at a heavy price. According to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, people who refuse to face up to “non-being” are acting in “bad faith” and living out a life that is inauthentic and unfulfilling.

Facing up to non-being can bring insecurity, loneliness, responsibility, and, consequently, anxiety, but it can also bring a sense of calm, freedom, and even nobility. Far from being pathological, existential anxiety is a necessary transitional phase, a sign of health, strength, and courage, and a harbinger of bigger and better things to come.

For the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, refusing to face up to non-being leads not only to inauthenticity, as Sartre had said, but also to pathological (or neurotic) anxiety.

In The Courage to Be, Tillich writes:

He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.

According to this striking outlook, pathological anxiety, although seemingly grounded in threats to life, in fact, arises from repressed existential anxiety, which itself arises from our uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness.

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty.

It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into a life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make, and get, the most out of our lives.

This esoteric understanding is what I have come to call “the philosophical cure for fear and anxiety.”

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Le_Jardin_de_Nébamoun.jpgIneni, architect to Pharaoh Thutmose I (d. 1492 BCE), had his garden painted into his tomb, along with a list of all the trees within it—presumably, so that they might be accounted for in the afterlife.

Ineni’s garden included:

  • 170 date palm
  • 120 doum palm
  • 73 sycamore fig
  • 31 persea
  • 16 carob
  • 12 grape vine
  • 10 tamarisk
  • 8 willow
  • 5 fig
  • 5 pomegranate
  • 5 garland thorn
  • 2 moringa
  • 2 myrtle

A grand garden of this sort symbolized control and mastery over nature, a haven of peace and plenty, of order and beauty, by which to project the status, power, and temperament of its owner. Other, more famous, examples include the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Gardens of the Real Alcázar in Seville, and the Gardens of Versailles.

The garden could also have a religious or philosophical message or dimension. For example, the Old Testament’s four rivers of Eden are represented by four watercourses in Islamic paradise gardens, and four paths in Christian cloister gardens. The Zen garden, by hinting at hidden principles, serves as an aid to meditation about the true meaning of existence.

The Gardens at Versailles reflect a rationalist, Cartesian vision of God-given ideas and principles for the intellect to apprehend or recognize, whereas English landscape gardens are more in the empiricist mold, presenting nature as a stream of sensory experiences skirting across the blank slate of the mind.

In either case, the garden represents a taming of nature, from dark and deadly forest, or disease-infested swamp, to an extension of our living space: open and structured to still our minds, but retaining enough mystery to sustain our interest and even, perhaps, capture our imagination.

Individual plants too can have a meaning. English churchyards often feature yew trees, which are poisonous, dark, and evergreen, and symbolize both death and immortality. A yew tree is commonly found near the lychgate, where, prior to the advent of mortuaries, cadavers guarded by vigils awaited burial.

In the ancient world, the palm tree symbolized victory, peace, and bounty, while the cedar of Lebanon symbolized pride, majesty, and dignity. Both also stood for righteousness, as in Psalm 92:12: “the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree, grow tall like the cedar of Lebanon.” Today, Cedrus libani is the national emblem of Lebanon, and a symbol of the peaceful Cedar Revolution of 2005.

Trees can also be planted to mark an important occasion, which is why British royals are often asked to brandish a shovel. In a recent annual tradition, the Friends of my local park purchase a noteworthy tree and invite a dignitary such as the Lord Mayor to plant it.

Today, gardening is more popular than ever. According to the National Gardening Survey 2018, more American households (77%) are gardening than ever before. In the U.K. 87% of homes have access to a garden, and 27 million people report a personal interest or active engagement in gardening, even if it is only on a balcony.

Sporting replacements of the BBC’s flagship Gardeners’ World achieve only a third of presenter Monty Don’s usual viewing figures of almost three million—which, in the U.K. is many more people than go to church.

Community garden projects and ‘guerrilla gardening’ are on the rise, as are garden towns and villages. Two years ago, one of my neighbours organized for thousands of daffodils to be planted on a neglected and overlooked common, transforming it into a Wordsworthian idyll for the selfie generation. I wonder, do they know that ‘daffodil’ is Narcissus in Latin?

Gardening is more and more recognized, and even prescribed, for its health benefits. These include: increased muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness; improved sleep and diet (if you grow your own produce); reduced stress, anxiety, and depression; a greater sense of community and belonging; and better self-esteem.

You don’t even have to get your hands dirty: some of these benefits accrue simply from visiting a garden, or even just looking over one—although it probably helps to notice and mentally engage with the greenery.

Researchers in Korea randomly assigned hospital patients recovering from thyroidectomy to rooms with plants and flowers, and rooms without, and found that the test group fared significantly better, asking for less pain relief and requiring less time in hospital. So yes, it makes sense to bring flowers, and, at home, to have indoor plants.

Even street trees greatly benefit our health. An American study looking at the city of Toronto found that, for cardio-metabolic conditions (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity…), an increase of just 11 trees per city block compared to an increase in annual personal income of $20,000.

How might gardening help with mental health? To various degrees, we live inside the stories we tell ourselves. But gardening drags us out of our tortured heads and back into the natural world, which blunts the ideological and emotional extremes to which detached, abstract thought is prone.

In 1920, a mentally strained Ludwig Wittgenstein took up the post of assistant gardener at Klosterneuburg Abbey, explaining in a letter to a friend that he had been longing for “some kind of regularized work which, of all the things I can do in my present condition, is the most nearly bearable…”

Voltaire’s Candide (1759) is an attack on the highly abstracted, convoluted, and strained philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and famously concludes with the phrase “we must cultivate our garden.”

In the Philosophy of Existence (1938), Karl Jaspers describes this disinterested process of looking outside oneself—or phenomenology, as it is sometimes called—as “a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me.”

Just picture the gardener’s pure and simple delight at the first crocuses or tulips, a bird’s nest, a swarm of bees…

If gardening makes us feel better, it also makes us into better people. It is a moral education, a school of life, instilling virtues such as pragmatism, patience, perseverance, reliability, and humility, which then transfer out into other spheres.

In his treatise on agriculture (c. 160 BCE), Cato is quite clear that farmers make the bravest and strongest soldiers, and that, of all men, they are “the most highly respected, most stable, and least hated.”

In Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), Socrates compares the wise man to the good husbandman, who is careful to scatter the right seed in the right soil in the right season. Similarly, the good teacher is careful to sow the right words in the right soul at the right time. For Plato, the Divine Teacher, teaching is the gardening of the soul.

Building on these notions, Epicurus (d. 270 BCE) sought in his garden just outside Athens to return to an agricultural golden age of harmony, community, and self-sufficiency—to ground a flourishing life in the midst of a flourishing garden.

A garden is a microcosm of the outside world. Gardeners are acutely aware of the rhythms and cycles of nature: which flowers are in their prime, when to plant out the seedlings, when and how and how much it last rained. Just as music is time made audible, so the garden is “time made visible” [Clive James].

Winter is difficult, yes because it is dark and cold, but also because time is no longer structured by a succession of flowerings and fruitings. Time becomes amorphous, to be entertained and endured rather than savoured and celebrated like the season of magnolias, cherry blossom, rhubarb, plums, or chestnuts.

More than just keen observers of time, gardeners are real-life Time Lords, able to speed up time by working in the garden, and later to slow it right down by sitting back and surveying the fruits of their labour. Some gardeners are even able to step out of time altogether, working year round to create timeless moments of perfection.

But moments are all they will ever be. When you paint a picture or write a book, it is there for ever (and isn’t that just amazing?), but when you mow the lawn you have to do it all over again in just a few days’ time. The gardener is like Sisyphus, the mythological king made to repeat for all eternity the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again.

In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus concludes: “The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognizing and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.