Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt: What can I learn from others–even the people I don’t like?

The associated meditation today is all about how the Stoics were open to learning from other philosophers. They didn’t see Stoicism as a fundamentalist philosophy, diametrically opposed to, say, Epicureanism.

I’ve said this before: I could never be a pure Stoic. The thing is, I don’t think the Stoics even expected most people to be that pure.

Being open and listening to others, provided some basics are not in question (for instance, the idea that all humans have basic rights to food, security, and basic freedoms (so long as the exercising of those freedoms does not harm others) has always been a key part of my own philosophy.

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I’m almost vibrating with sudden anticipation today.

The OSM (Montreal Symphony) released their season today. And first up–just three weeks hence–is Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5. And there are two other Shostakovich symphonies planned for the year.

The symbolism of this particular work being the likely breaking of my symphonic fast does not escape me. And the time is close enough at hand for me to feel fairly confident that it should go ahead.

I already have a ticket booked. We’ll be going up for a couple of days, hoping to see some of the things we missed on our first trip. And I had enough points to receive a substantial discount on my hotel room.

In other news, this evening, while sitting on a patio with the Eoforwic folks, I finished the embroidery I have been working on. I’m waiting until tomorrow to share it, as it needs to be pressed and I want to have one last look at it to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Tomorrow, though. I’m very happy with it, especially the fact that I was able to use some of my metallic gold bullion that I have had in stash for years.

I also got a little packet in the mail with some goodies from the An Tir scribal challenge—tokens from both competitions, a scissor tag and a thread holder, some gold paint, and the amazing bead that’s at the top of this post (yes, that’s a feather quill. There’s a heart on the back of it.)

Finally, yesterday I found out that Fibonacci numbers have an application in Agile project management. The series is used as part of a points rating system to decide how many things to fit into a sprint or a release. Essentially, if you have a backlog of items you want to do, you go through with your team to assign values to each: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. The longer and more complex the item, or the more critical, the bigger number it gets. You then decide how many points you can realistically allocate to a sprint or release. It’s then a matter of grouping things accordingly. Today, we were set to propose such a scheme to our technology team but unfortunately a key person was out, so it’s deferred to next week. (And I’d even worn my phi necklace in honour of it. Oh well)