I've been distracted this last week by my children visiting, but they're gone now, and so it's back to writing.

Read Seneca's Letters from a Stoic over the last couple days, and have been struck at the similarities between Seneca's account of the balanced life– which is less austere than some Stoics– and the life described by Buddhists. The former is less explicitly meditative, but nonetheless it seems to me that they're aiming at roughly the same things.

This also struck me, because of my own need to move from citing other people's work to creating my own:

It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have a wisdom deriving solely from his notebook. ‘Zeno said this.’ And what have you said? ‘Cleanthes said that.’ What have yous aid? How much longer are you going to serve under others’ orders? Assume authority yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources. (Letter XXXVIII)