Action Points and Summary

Thanks for supporting The Classics Cave.

Please visit and support our sponsors.

The following workout is related to the Cynics.

Workout 1 comes from the Cave’s

The Cynics Workbook & Journal.

You can read about the Cynics and Cynicism in the Cave’s

The Best of the Cynics: The Lives, Writings & Teachings of the Ancient Cynics.

__________

3 Action Points

• Understand the nature of endurance and why it is necessary to endure. Identify excellent people, those you admire and would like to imitate, whose excellence is based in part on their long-term choice to endure, to embrace toil, hardship, and suffering.

• Choose to endure. Make it your practice to daily (in some small way) embrace toil, hardship, and suffering. Train yourself to endure even greater things (say, once per week or month). Be creative in the way you choose to practice to endure. Recognize that an endurance habit (the regular choice to endure) will take time to develop (yet another thing you can choose to endure!). So walk the endurance path one (small) step at a time.

• Review your practice. How did things go? If necessary, redefine the parameters (what, when, where, how, etc.) of your choice to endure in any small or large way.

The Art of Endurance – Embracing Toil, Hardship & Suffering

Workout Summary

Workout 1 introduces the Cynic art of endurance, the art that encourages humans to embrace toil, hardship, and suffering.

We begin by defining “endurance” and asking whether and why endurance is necessary to human life.

We continue with an exercise challenging us to analyze different kinds of people, relationships, and life callings (vocations) relative to each one’s need to endure. Along with this exercise, we look at our own past and a few times we found it necessary to endure and how we did it.

Finally, after a brief reflection on “the endurance choice,” we turn to practice endurance, selecting three things we can choose to endure. As always, we finish by evaluating our practice.

To see Workout 1 – “The Art of Endurance – Embracing Toil, Hardship & Suffering” in whole, click on the PDF “Workout 1 – The Art of Endurance – Embracing Toil, Hardship & Suffering.”

Best of benefits in practicing!

The Cave.