WHAT’S the link between the following:
The amount of hair discarded daily by human beings
A robot hoover
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelias
Stoicism (a set of ancient rules we are all supposed to live by).
And, naturally, er, me?
Some weeks before Christmas, a friend recommended the purchase of a robot hoover. This being a person who does not gladly suffer fools or foolish things, and who has had a robot hoover for a long time and found it excellent, we got one.
So then I got stuck to the bed with flu over Christmas, which is where, for a specific reason to do with the robot hoover, I became interested in the amount of human hair that falls out of the human body every day as part of its natural cycle of renewal.
According to the American Academy of Dermatology, it’s normal for a person to lose between 50 and 100 hairs a day.
In light of the fact that I didn’t have the energy to use the ordinary hoover, and given that nobody else was going to do it, I issued a sickbed decree that the robot be brought upstairs to, well, God damn it, hoover the place out.
You know. Get rid of dust, hairs, that sort of thing.
The robot chugged away for a while.
Then it suddenly stopped working.
I resentfully dragged myself downstairs to the kitchen table where I flipped through the instruction booklet. Irritably.
Hair, it seemed, among other things, could possibly be a problem. I turned the robot upside down and studied the instructions to remove some panel or other and clear the main brush of hair.
The manufacturers seemed to know that a lot of hair would need to be hoovered up by the robot, something which was a revelation. This was not something I had ever thought about.
The manufacturers had provided a special little sharp-edged brush to do this, but given that the brush was probably still in the robot hoover box somewhere, and my lack of energy for searching, I used my fingers and a needle-nosed scissors.
True enough, hair also seemed to have wrapped itself around the little side brush and the front wheel, but there were no written guidelines to removing and cleaning these, only some ridiculously unintelligible diagrams.
Clearly, the manufacturers hadn’t reckoned on me as a robot hoover- fixer.
Maybe, I thought, given the impact of the flu, I’d been discarding more than my allocated 100 hairs a day and now the hoover had given up because it was tangled in all that hair.
This was the one time I really needed the robot. The floors were dusty and more than likely suffocating in discarded hair.
And now, thanks to the flu and all my hair falling out, the robot had gone and given up on me. Typical.
I sat in my dusty, un-hoovered kitchen and bawled. Then I dragged myself back all the way back up to bed.
After a few minutes I could, in fairness, see the situation with some clarity.
Woman with too much time on her hands ruminating about first-world irrelevancies. Imagine my grandmother having a robot hoover!
This only made me feel even worse.
Now, in fairness, this is what a bad dose of flu can do to you.
Then something came up on a history site on my phone about stoicism and Marcus Aurelius - you know, one of the famous Roman emperors; Richard Harris played him in Gladiator. Brilliant film. One of my top three of all time.
For some reason, I was fascinated. I literally hoovered up the information.
Long story short, Marcus Aurelius was actually not just a warrior, he was a Stoic.
I had heard of stoics and about the philosophy of stoicism, but I didn’t really know anything about any of it.
Stoicism is basically a philosophy and a set of rules to live by.
The Stoics were not better or wiser or more resilient than the rest of us - they felt fear, frustration and annoyance too.
But they were philosophers and psychologists, and they had rules.
One of their rules was: Only Focus on What’s in your Control.
I thought about it. Realistically, was the welfare of this robot hoover in my control, given my utter technical ineptness? No.
Another rule: Don’t Suffer Imagined Troubles. Did the robot hoover deliberately give up because I had the flu and would be unable to fix it?
It did not.
A third rule: Constantly Ask Is This Necessary?
Was this over-reaction on my part necessary?
No, it certainly was not, I agreed sheepishly.
Slowly I came back to reality.
Well, you know what. Wow. My husband came home from work, inspected the robot, glanced at the unintelligible diagrams, and explained that the device hadn’t been put on the charging station properly the last time, so its battery had just run flat.
He located the special sharp-edged brush, sat down, glanced at the unintelligible diagrams and rapidly removed the hair knotted around the front wheel and the side-brush, which, he acknowledged, would more than likely have caused problems at some point.
Then he placed the robot in the correct position on its charging station.
He did not at any point act superior.
I joined a website called daily-stoic.com. New Year’s Resolution: I’m on the way to becoming a Stoic.
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