Being a gamer, I remember playing Everquest. I remember spending long times playing that game – and forming longtime friendships there. I remember when they heard about this new game coming out Worlds of Warcarft (wow) and how they were all excited. One of my friends was “in the know” with the game development community and got us all alpha invites to help with testing.
I remember playing “wow” before it was released, and “testing” particular things. Learning the game from both the Horde side (commonly thought of as the bad guys but not really) and the Alliance (commonly thought of as the good guys but not really) and trying different classes.
I remember that even though we worked so hard to level up a character in this new exciting game, they would be reset and were when release happened. We started over.
My particular group of friends formed a “guild” (group of friends that all gather together for a common purpose, makes item/currency exchange easier, and significantly makes chatting within the game easier) They named the guild “Apatheia” — which at the time I recall feeling was the same as apathy and felt it was an odd name but what ever type of thing.
Paths diverged as they so often do and I lost touch with those folks.
Today in posting, I had cause to look up both Apathy and Apatheia on the great source of wisdom for this age “google” ….
Apathy:
ap·a·thy/ˈapəTHē/Learn to pronouncenoun
- lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern.
Apatheia: Apatheia (Greek: ἀπάθεια; from a- “without” and pathos “suffering” or “passion”), in Stoicism, refers to a state of mind in which one is not disturbed by the passions. It is best translated by the word equanimity rather than indifference. The meaning of the word apatheia is quite different from that of the modern English apathy, which has a distinctly negative connotation. According to the Stoics, apatheia was the quality that characterized the sage.
In hindsight of life, this makes so much more sense why they named the guild this – and today, of all days I’m struck with a very uncharacteristic sense of apatheia.
It strikes a cord with me that its derivation is Greek – always find it amusing when a word harmonizes with the origin of my name.
This is test week – so far I’ve done my MRI & CT – and due to the mixed blessing/curse of the modern age and posting of results I have gotten results back from both. Mixed bag. I’ll wait for doctors to “translate and put spin” on these things.
It is just striking to me how going into this week I have just had an overwhelming sense of Apatheia.
Next week is chemo and there are so many fun things to be looking into and exploring thats pretty much all I need to say.
Life is good.