Eudaimonia

If you sometimes get the sense that StoicMom is out of touch with what’s happening in the (gender) world, I want to be right up front with you and let you know, it’s because I am. There was some lively discussion going on in the comment section of my last piece, Why me? that inspired me to finally write this one (which has been on my mind, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to put it all out there.) We’ll see what happens. I think (hope) this one will give readers some clarity as to whether this is where you want to spend your time when there’s so much out there vying for your attention.

The truth is, there’s a good chance I have a very different goal than you. I believe that parents who find themselves destabilized in this world overtaken by an ideology that has the power to seduce our children away from us, logically join together in a righteous cause: to stop the atrocity known as “Gender Affirming Care.” (Forgive the scare quotes–I still struggle to use that term unironically.) I do kinda share this goal, but I’m a firm believer that frontal assault doesn’t work–at least not with enduring results. I remain unconvinced that you attain peace with war. This just doesn’t compute for me. 

Fun fact: I started to write this article early last week and got stuck. I’ve come to trust the block. If I don’t force my way past the obstacle, the reason for it eventually becomes clear. In this case, it was because I was going in an unproductive direction. The tone was too provocative and didn’t match the title, Eudaimonia–a concept I’ve been wanting to write about but had to wait until the content came to me. I thought it had, but then I hit a wall. I think I’m often trying to describe something that is so foreign to some, that it may sound to you like I’m rambling about meaningless nonsense, but hopefully this comes together by the end of this piece. 

So back to frontal assaults and how my goal may differ from yours. This might be where it makes sense for me to remind that I’ve been at this awhile. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that by “at this” I mean more than just parenting a trans-identified daughter. That part’s been going on since she was 14-15 back in 2018-2019, but even before that I was hellbent on growing but feeling more like I was drowning. I do touch on this a bit in Why me? but at that point in my life, I found myself desperate for a God to pray to, for a belief system that brought me comfort and optimism; something that gave me hope that humanity could figure its shit out before we destroy ourselves and our planet. Faith. And also guidance–just how was I supposed to live my life in integrity? 

Thing is, I couldn’t just start going to church because to be in integrity, the belief system had to make sense to me and not contradict any of my hard-earned values or require magical thinking–though this may have shifted a little for me along the way. Some of what I say may come across as magical–it often feels that way to me. I’m not inclined to deny the synchronicities that have brought me to where I am, and there’s that whole block/obstacle thing that I now allow to guide me. It all sounds kinda spiritual, yeah? Magical even? This may be where you roll your eyes and click away. I get it; I might have done the same a few years ago. 

I definitely went through an obsession-with-gender-ideology phase. Like you may be doing right now, I also acquired the equivalent of a PhD in Woke Studies. I raged and railed against the systems that captured my daughter’s heart and mind while I was distracted with my own existential crisis. During this period of years after discovering her identity, I crumpled often from the anguish, keening from the depths of disappointment at my own impotence to get others to see the buck naked emperor and help me save my daughter. Finding others who hadn’t been captured and replaced by Stepford wives became a top priority for my sanity, and spiraling with them into righteous indignation became my favorite thing to do. 

Yet the Universe kept bringing me moments, people, resources, synchronicities to steer me in a different direction. Back to that original quest for spirituality. I determined to make sense of what was happening and could see that we’ve been headed here–to this iteration of humanity where so many people can accept “Gender Affirming Care” with no sense of horror–for a very long time. This is just one way that the pain of where we’ve come to as a species is presenting. I think this is our children saying, “This world is too scary and sick for me to be myself in.” They’re trying to tell us that something has gone terribly wrong and it’s time we figure out how to heal it. 

I can imagine at this point, you may be thinking, but we need to stop GAC now before it hurts my child, or any one else’s child for that matter. I understand this goal, I don’t begrudge you this goal, but my goal has changed. 

I want to contribute to the world that invites my children to be authentic and open-hearted, resilient and eager to share their gifts. I want them to see the beauty that abounds, to not be afraid to feel joy, to feel deeply connected to others and Life in general. See, I think I’ve found religion in this paradigm shift. But I don’t call it God, I call it Life. (If you have God and you get comfort and encouragement to pay attention to the beauty in the world from that relationship, then I believe that you are indeed blessed and encourage you to stick with it.) And my goal isn’t victory, but eudaimonia. It’s an ancient word, but I just recently learned it. If you’re new to the word, I’ll come back and define it in a minute, but first I want to tell you about an insight I recently had when it comes to words and concepts. 

I was reading a review of a book that’s been on my Read List for some time, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein. (Which I’m currently, finally reading and which helped me understand and move through the block to writing this piece.) And this reviewer was condemning Eisenstein for focusing so much of the book around the concept of interbeing and not giving credit to the wise monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who coined the word and describes the concept. And it occurred to me that I doubt this famous monk would mind much. That we know a concept has really pervaded our culture when we stop crediting the person who introduced it, when it becomes rarely defined in discussion because it’s so commonly used and everyone just knows what it means. I’m pretty sure the late Thich Nhat Hanh would want this for the healing concept of interbeing and its potential to inform our worldview.

Anyway, that is to say, that I would love to see the word, eudaimonia, become more common–let’s incorporate it into our language. At this point, if you don’t already know, you’re probably getting irritated with me for not yet defining it, so before I lose you to the Google search engine, let me take care of that.  If you look up synonyms for eudaimonia, you get things like happiness, well-being, contentment, satisfaction, but these all fall a little short, not quite capturing the essence of this word. I learned it from reading the books of Jeremy Lent. In his latest, The Web of Meaning, he contrasts the values that contribute to a state of eudaimonia with those of a more hedonic approach to life, where we seek to continuously indulge our addictions to pleasure, convenience, and comfort. 

Here’s a bit more on the concept of eudaimonia from The Ethics Center

The closest English word for the Ancient Greek term eudaimonia is probably “flourishing”. The philosopher Aristotle used it as a broad concept to describe the highest good humans could strive toward – or a life 'well lived'.

A life well-lived. So simple—yet I love it so much. For me this means a life full of meaning and purpose but also full of joy and delight. It’s a rich, messy life full of exhilarating highs, but also painful lows that I know I can handle and that also give me new understanding and contexts for me to deepen my relationship with Self and others. And yes, I still strive to make meaningful change, but I go about it with peace in my heart. And it’s no longer about rescuing my child from GAC but about relating to her as a whole, healthy human with the capacity to develop resilience and create a life well-lived for herself.

If this is all starting to seem rather boring or obnoxious to you, pay attention to that. I think the rage period is important. Isn’t anger one of the phases of grief? Eventually though, that destabilization of recognizing the world is not what you thought becomes so intense that it’s intolerable. This is about the time you hit a fork in the road, and you choose a path. (But maybe you only see one path?) Often the path that calls you is that of the Activist, the Warrior. I thought this might be the path for me, but I quickly learned that I didn’t like what it did to my relationships and my wellbeing. When I checked in with myself and what I value and believe in, it was clear this path didn’t align for me. 

So I’ve chosen a different path. I dove back into what I was studying prior to the awareness of my daughter’s gradual and unnoticed induction into this new worldview. (I’ve had to forgive myself for this.) I didn’t stumble across the concept of interbeing until after I’d already arrived there myself. Isn’t it amazing when you discover a word to describe something you’re experiencing? I know this can be a little dangerous, and sometimes it definitely feels a little magical–is it synchronicity when the vocabulary word you’ve been craving lands in your algorithms? Before I came across interbeing, I’d say things like connectedness or simply Life, and I’d fall short of the mark, much like happiness or contentment fall short of communicating the full concept of eudemonia. Oh shit–did I lose you to Google after all? Let’s come back to interbeing another time…

I believe we can change the world. I have faith in humanity and in Life itself. But as I said in Why me?, I think change starts as an inside job.  At the end of Chapter 7 of Eisenstein’s More Beautiful World, which I was listening to on my morning walk today, he says, “who we are, and how we relate, affect what we create.” In other words, the means matter–I’d say profoundly. If we force what we think is right onto others, we perpetuate a paradigm of force. I think we’re recognizing that humans instinctively resist coercion and it might be time for a different way to relate to each other. This is the shift I want to be part of. There’s much more to this different way, but this isn’t the article to explain it all. What is relevant and what amazes me is that Eisenstein’s work, Jeremy Lent’s work, and that of others who have shifted to this new way of thinking, these works have found their way to me in synchronistic fashion to reinforce this direction, this path I’ve chosen. It feels damn good. It feels optimistic. I’ll take it. 

I want to model for my children a life well-lived. I want to model eudaimonia because I think our children see so little of this in the world they inhabit. If this doesn’t resonate for you, I think it’s important to listen to that. It’s not my place to tell you what’s right or what to do. I can’t take responsibility for your experience, or my daughter’s experience, or anyone’s experience but my own. You are a whole person, an amazing human with incredible capacity, and I have faith in you to do that for yourself. (Though it certainly helps to hold hands with others who are also doing it!)

Maybe as we near the end of this one, you realize this didn’t clear up anything for you after all. What I’m realizing is that I trust that it will resonate for those who needed it; those who could use a word like eudaimonia in their vocabulary. If it all just sounds like a bunch of confusing psychobabble, then that’s a good indicator that maybe the content here at the SMP is not a good fit for you. Of course, you’re welcome to stick around, but I just want to make sure you have an idea of what you’ll find here and what you won’t. If you’re firmly on the Warrior path, I want to free you to stop trying to make the SMP work for you. That said, if you keep finding yourself compelled to read the latest SMP article and discover what this weird lady is saying today, maybe there is something here for you. Maybe you’d also enjoy the work of Charles Eisenstein, Jeremy Lent, Thich Nhat Hanh, Carl Jung, Iain McGilchrist and others who offer us a very different way of seeing and of being in the world. I happen to believe it’s a way that just may save us all, one flourishing human at a time.