James Stockdale
Not a philosopher by trade, but perhaps the most striking modern proof that Stoicism is more than words. Shot down and held prisoner for over seven years, he later said it was the philosophy of Epictetus that carried him through.
Already a seasoned navy pilot, James Stockdale was sent mid-career to study at Stanford, and there one of his professors handed him a small book: the Enchiridion of Epictetus, the ex-slave who taught that some things are up to us and some are not. Stockdale read it and kept it close.
Years later his plane was shot down and he was taken prisoner, held for more than seven years in brutal conditions. He couldn’t control almost anything about his situation. What he could still control, he later explained, was himself: his choices, and how he carried what was being done to him. That one Stoic distinction, he said, was what kept him whole.
The book he carried
Some things are in our power, and others are not.
What he took from it, in our words
They could take his freedom, his comfort, almost everything, but not his power to choose who he would be inside it. Holding onto that one thing was how he survived with himself intact.
We tell this gently, and a child doesn’t need the hard details. But Stockdale’s story answers a fair question a parent might ask: is this Stoic stuff just nice words, or does it hold when life gets truly hard? Here is one real answer. The same idea we hand a child at bedtime, that you can’t choose everything that happens but you always have a say in how you meet it, is the idea a grown man leaned on through years no one should have to face. It held.
Stories that grow from these ideas
For parents
Old ideas, gently told.
Stoic Sprout turns thinking like this into calm stories a child can actually hear. A few are free to try.