A philosophy can be a jedi mind trick. Especially stoicism A different view often is the determining factor in a response and how it allows us to view stuttering and our position is especially clear in stoicism. I can write a discourse but I will summarize what "Larry" a modern quadrapalegic stoic has said and adapt it for stuttering . -The importance of agency. It has been important for myself to feel like an agent in the world, not a patient. This requires the accomplishment of three big tasks: i) To become and remain an agent in the first place. We begin our lives as “patients,” helpless infants (“entry level human beings”) who are entirely dependent on others. We slowly learn how to be agents, from scratch. We become adults, taking charge of our lives, claiming and earning our agency (all of which is perfectly compatible with the Stoic doctrine of ethical development). For Larry, the most devastating disabilities are precisely those that severely limit or entirely erase our agency. Yet he claims that even if stuttering paralyzes you completely, it by itself still doesn’t permanently rob you of your agency. But you may need to reclaim it, slowly and painfully. Indeed, he saw the whole question of dealing with his disability as coinciding with his need to reclaim his agency. After you have reclaimed agency, however, you are in the same position as everyone else: ii) You have to become good at being an agent. This, says Larry, requires lining up six elements:  values, preferences, goals, deliberations, decisions and actions. If these are incoherent, incomplete or weak then you are paralyzed no matter what your physical condition is. You can also be paralyzed by indecision, because you are not committed to a particular course of action and wish to retain multiple possibilities open. Too many choices on the menu, or too many cars in the dealer’s lot aren’t a good thing. To complicate things, there is the fact that the world itself changes, requiring constant adjustments to our goals, decisions and actions. Which means: iii) We need to learn how to maintain agency under changing circumstances. Like airline pilots, we need to keep learning new skills, but unlike airline pilots, we don’t have the luxury of simulators. Life only happens once, and we learn “in the air,” not in a safe environment, and we usually also have passengers (i.e., people we care about) on board, too! Focus on abilities, not disabilities. Larry has learned to disregard his disability, or at the least to regard it as unimportant (what a Stoic would call a “dispreferred indifferent“). This requires four more tasks: i) Keep the focus incessantly on abilities. The emphasis should be on what we can do, not on what we cannot do — and of course this goes for every human being, including those who we normally don’t recognize as “disabled.” “I can’t do that.” “You can do it, this way.” ii) The Socratic task: know thyself. Know your physical and psychological abilities, which includes knowing their limits. Ignorance, or worse, self-deception, about one’s abilities is a very dangerous thing in life. iii) Keep an up-to-date, accurate account of what is possible for you. This will depend not just on your abilities, but also on the specific (and variable) physical and social environments in which you find yourself at different times. iv) Recognize when you have lost a good fit between your abilities and your activities. It is about developing what Larry calls an “internal alarm system,” which tells us when it’s time to stop suffering and begin (or resume) to take charge. Larry knows from experience that all of this is hard, that it takes practice and that, in his opinion, requires some perspective. Developing a life plan. Here Larry comments on the importance of taking a look at your entire life, making plans and arriving at decisions “all things considered,” as philosophers say. The idea isn’t the naive one of figuring out what one wants to do in life early on and then just implement the plan, Soviet-style. Rather, the suggestion is to reflect on what is important for us and on the best way to achieve it, but also to continuously revise “the plan,” according to our changing abilities and circumstances. Our dynamic plan should be coherent, ambitious, possible to achieve, revisable and — ideally — compatible with general rising levels of life satisfaction. In his particular case, Larry admits that he failed to keep things in perspective in the late ’80s, or he wouldn’t have denied the onset of the late effects of polio, instead he would have said to himself, “you know, maybe this fear of long staircases is not that unreasonable after all.” Internal harmony. This is about constantly attempting to harmonize the components of your (dynamic) life plan. We need to harmonize spiritual and rational experiences, our desires and our needs, our reason with our action. “Personally, I think to have a harmonious life is preferable to being an interesting subject for a biographer, a journalist, or a gossiper.” Brick walls. We need to recognize them when we hit them, and even better to see them coming before we hit them hard. This, says Larry, amounts to knowing when to quit: not a minute too soon, nor a minute too late. It means to keep learning about your abilities throughout life. If it looks like a brick wall, first make sure it really is one, then try to act accordingly. “If it is an illusion, then you can go through it; if it is not, then you need to work around it, or go in another direction entirely.” The problem, he adds, is that we seem to have trouble figuring out which brick walls are worth worrying about, or trying to tear down. The way Larry deals with it is by going back to the basics and first identify his fundamental life goals and commitments: to his wife of 46 years and to the goals of their life together, to his professional goals, to creating a truly physically and socially hospitable environment for everyone. Those are the cases when he is willing to stop only if there is an actual brick wall, and only if he hits it pretty hard. Ramps, however, don’t fall into that category, “doing without a wheel chair is not a basic life goal.”