‘I’m not saying I’m a stoic. That sounds like nothing can touch me’, says Rob Voorwinden (58, communication advisor). ‘Of course I am sometimes angry or sad. That’s why I prefer to call myself a ‘stoist’. Stoicism is a philosophy of life that simply comes down to: you can’t choose what happens to you in life, but you can choose how you respond to it.’
Suppose you receive a completely unjustified scolding from your boss. You can sit at home and eat yourself about that, says Voorwinden: I have to find another job, I feel so bad, he can’t do that. ‘But he can. I’ve never had one myself, luckily, but there are plenty of unreasonable bosses, you can mute the IJsselmeer with them. You can also think: I have nice colleagues and a good salary, let my boss chat. That attitude brings me a lot of peace in life. For years, since I discovered Stoicism.’
When was that?
‘A friend wrote a book on rational-emotive therapy, which leans quite a bit on stoicism. Then I got into it. Around that time I was going through a divorce – we weren’t married, but if your girlfriend falls in love with someone else after eighteen years and runs away, you can call it a divorce. I got a lot out of it then. I managed to flip the switch; I could spend the rest of my life moping, but I could also go ahead and make something out of it. That worked out well. I’ve been married for a long time and father of three.’
Does stoicism also come in handy in corona time?
‘Yes, of course. You can’t change anything about a pandemic, but you can change how you fill in the time when so much is lost. I started learning Arabic through an app. I’ve been practicing for over five hundred days in a row, that app has kept track of that for me. It keeps me busy and it’s challenging, I set myself those goals. In addition, in our neighborhood there is a note on the gate of the mosque and I wanted to know what it said. ‘Come in, the coffee is ready’ or ‘Down with the infidels?’ That matters. It turns out ‘Placing bicycles prohibited’.
‘Stoicism is pleasantly concrete, it involves many practical exercises. For example, you have to imagine that something very bad happens: a family member with the flu who ends up in the hospital, for example, after which it ends fatally. After such a thinking exercise you can breathe a sigh of relief. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. That way, things always go well instead of against.
‘I always go to my 97-year-old father on Sundays. I got off the train last week and thought: I’m so lucky. I listen to a nice podcast, I can walk pain-free again after a persistent running injury and I go to my old father with whom I can still talk very well. Then I walk on Sunday morning at half past nine in the drizzle over an industrial estate near Rotterdam and I am very happy.’
But sometimes things just suck, right?
‘Yes, because of corona I have already missed Lowlands twice and Into the Great Wide Open twice, plus a lot of other concerts. But things always don’t go the way you want, so it’s better to look at what is going well. I was supposed to go to the punk band Hang Youth in Paradiso and exactly that night there was another lockdown. The concert was moved to 3pm. I was there with my sons aged 17, 15 and 12, it was an afternoon with extra shine.’