Sympatheia & the View from Above
This week you are learning about sympatheia, a Greek word that means, literally, "feeling with" or "fellow-feeling with everything." The Stoics used it to name their conviction that the entire universe is one living, breathing whole, and that every part of it, from a blade of grass to a human soul to a distant star, participates in and responds to the life of every other part. Understanding sympatheia is worth your time because it changes the scale at which you see yourself: instead of a small, separate creature buffeted by a large and indifferent world, you begin to see yourself as a thread in a fabric that is, at its deepest level, on your side.
Passage
Through the matter of the Whole, as through a winter torrent, all bodies are passing, connatural with the Whole and co-operating with it, as our members work with one another. How many a Chrysippus, a Socrates, an Epictetus has Eternity already sucked down!
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VII.19
Reflection
Now Marcus introduces time. The same interconnected whole that includes everything in space also moves through time like a torrent, and it carries everyone with it, even the greatest minds, Chrysippus the philosopher, Socrates, Epictetus himself. This is the 'View from Above' coming into focus: when you zoom out far enough, every individual life is a brief eddy in a vast current. This should not depress you. Marcus means it as a kind of relief. Your troubles, your reputation, your plans, they are all part of a river that has always been flowing and will keep flowing. You are connatural with the Whole, built of the same stuff, co-operating with it even when you do not realize it.
Go deeper
If you imagine the current of time carrying away the problem that is weighing on you most heavily right now, what remains that is worth your full attention today?
Practice
The Long View
Take seven minutes. Write down one thing that is currently worrying or preoccupying you. Then write three sentences placing it in expanding time: where will this concern stand in one year, in ten years, in a hundred? You are not dismissing the concern. You are giving it its actual size within the whole.