The Daily Stoic - Come Back To This Later

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Take your much deserved break today. We are human beings after all, not human doings. So go out and live today. Rest from your labor. Come back better for it. Come back improved and sharper for it.📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics,. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoics illustrated with stories from history, current events and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to

do a deeper dive setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on something to think on something to leave you with to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it. Labor Day was first proposed by Matthew Maguire, a labor union secretary in 1882 in New York. It is, he said, a tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country and the idea that they deserve to rest for that work. The Stoics were hard-driving,

no-excuses, disciplined folks who, despite their acceptance of slavery in the ancient world, would still have appreciated this idea. The mind must be given relaxation. It will rise improved and sharper after a good break, Seneca wrote. He used the analogy of farming. A field that isn't given a break, where crops are not rotated will quickly lose its fertility.

And so too will a mind and a body that's overworked. So by all means, take your much deserved break today. We are human beings after all, not human doings. Life will be long if you're lucky and you have much great work in front of you. If you break down early, wear yourself out before your time, where will that leave you? Where will that leave us?

In a way, overwork is selfish, no matter how much the workaholic claims they are doing it for other people, because it deprives them in the world of that later fertility. It causes needless breakdown and injury. As Seneca observed, constant work gives rise to a certain kind of dullness and feebleness

in the rational soul. Nobody likes a person who is all business all the time. So go out today and live today, rest from your labor, come back better for it, come back improved and sharper for it. That's the idea. This is your holiday. Take it. A hard winter training. The art of living has three levels of discipline, study, practice, and hard training. Reading the stoics or listening to them, that's study.

Trying out the lessons and reflecting on them in a journal. To friend, that's practice. What's left though is hard training. Epictetus liked to use the analogy of the Roman army's practice of training hard in the off months of winter so that they could be prepared to meet any challenge when they returned to battle in the spring. Seneca would spend time each month exposing himself to tougher than usual conditions. He too used a military analogy, pointing to the way

that soldiers are tasked with hard jobs so they could be strong when the enemy eventually came. So what are you doing in your life to push yourself beyond mere study and practice? And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours truly, and my co-writer and translator, Steven Hanselman. But this idea of keeping the thoughts at hand really ties into this week's entry.

We've got two quotes from Epictetus and one from Seneca. We must undergo a hard winter training and not rush into things for which we haven't prepared. That's Epictetus and his discourses. Here's Seneca in Moral Letters 18. Here's a lesson to test your mind's metal. Take part of the week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantily in shabby clothes,

and ask yourself, this is really the worst you feared It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead For when fortune is kind the soul can build up defenses against her ravages So it is that the soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight and Exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes, they won't grow tired. And then finally, Epictetus says, when a challenge confronts you, remember that God is matching you with a younger sparring partner, as would a physical trainer. Why? Because becoming an Olympian takes sweat. I think that no one has a

better challenge than yours. If only you would use it like an athlete would use a younger sparring partner. So a couple things here. One, I sometimes get this question, should I seek out adversity? If adversity is such a good teacher, should I seek it out? I say, look, for the most part, life is going to give us most of the training we need. Life's going to throw most of the adversity we need at us. So you don't need to go like getting yourself into trouble so you can know

what a prison cell feels like, right? I don't think that's really what it is. As Epictetus is saying, look, instead of bemoaning the adversity when you do feel it, go like, hey, this is good. This is training I needed. I'm going to use this. So I think about it that way. The other part is, how are you though actively engaged in training that makes you stronger, more mentally tough, more physically tough? So to me, this is where like a strong physical practice comes in. It's also where getting up early, maybe intermittent fasting, maybe cold showers, but mostly working out because I love working out, but still every time I have to convince myself to do it. I love running, it's almost painful not to run,

but there's still lots of days when I don't wanna do it and still be easier to go slower. I have to push myself every single time, but every time I do it, I get better at pushing myself. I usually do some sort of weight training about four days a week as well. And so that is much less fun for me. And I really do have to push myself to do it.

And that training though, the act of pushing myself to do something that I'm uncomfortable with, that's not fun, that challenges me, this doesn't just make me stronger and more fit and better at chasing my kids around the house. What it really does is make me better at overriding that impulse that I don't want to do something because it's hard or that I'm afraid or that's going to be exhausting. Again, I'm in the middle

of a book right now and you think I don't wake up so many days and I don't feel it, I don't want to do it, it's hard, what if I phone it in today? Is anyone really watching? Will anyone know? Well, I've trained for exactly that kind of insidious opponent I have as Steven Pressfield talks about I I know the resistance well I have built up a lot of muscles that make me stronger than the resistance and That's where this training comes in and I think that's a metaphor for all forms of adversity, difficulty, resistance, weakness in life. And so I hope you have some sort of active practice. Use the adversity, train against it when it's there, but also build some active daily practices or weekly practices in your life as well. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free

right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who lived to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig. Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland.

At around 10pm, workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.