The Daily Stoic - Daily Stoic Sundays: It’s Always the Time to Act Bravely

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

In today’s episode, Ryan reads an excerpt from Stillness Is the Key, describing the importance of actually taking action and living the way that your philosophy would direct you to act.This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. It tastes great and gets you the nutrients you need, whether you're working on the go, fueling an active lifestyle, or just maintaining your good health. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic and receive 20 free travel packs with your first purchase.Get Stillness Is the Key: https://geni.us/e7HTRead the excerpt here: https://ryanholiday.net/act-bravely/***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target. The new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance.

And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoke philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder's Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings.

But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. And SBF would find himself in a jail cell with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondery comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman Fried. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Because of everything that's happening in the world, I thought for today's episode, I would read a section from stillness that I'm most proud of that I think is one of the best things I've written, but I don't say that in a sense I'm trying to lecture you with it, it's something that I felt like I needed to reread something. I wrote as a challenge primarily to myself, but also to you. And I think it's turned out to be timely. And I think it's worth considering also.

So this is actually, I think, the last chapter in the book before the conclusion. And it's just titled Act Bravely. To see people who will notice a need in the world and do something about it, they are my heroes, Fred Rogers. In Camus' final novel, The Fall, his character Clements is walking alone on a street in Amsterdam when he hears what sounds like a woman falling into the water. He's not totally certain that's what he's heard, but mostly riding the high of a nice evening with his mistress, he does not want to be bothered. And so he continues on. A respected

lawyer with a reputation as a person of great virtue in his community, he returns to his normal life the following day and attempts to forget the sound he heard. He continues to represent clients and entertain his friends with persuasive political arguments, as he always has. Yet he begins to feel off. One day after a triumphant appearance in court arguing for a blind client, Clements gets the feeling he is being mocked and laughed at by a group of strangers he can't quite locate.. Later approaching a stalled motorist at an intersection, he is unexpectedly insulted and then assaulted. These encounters are unrelated, but they contribute to a weakening of the illusions he has long held about himself. It is not with an epiphany or from

a blow to the head that the monstrous truth of what he has done becomes clear. It is a slow, creeping realization that comes to clements and suddenly and irrevocably changes his self-perception. That night on the canal, he shrugged off a chance to save someone from committing suicide. This realization is clemences undoing and the central focus of the book, forced to see the hollowness of his pretensions

and the shame of his failings he unravels. He had believed he was a good man, but when the moment indeed moments called for goodness, he had slunk off into the night. It's a thought that haunts him incessantly as he walks the street at night, the cry of that woman, the one he ignored so many years before, never ceases to torment him. It toys with him too because his only hope of redemption is that he might hear it again in real life and then seize the opportunity to dive in and save someone from death.

It's too late he has failed. He will never be at peace again. The story is fictional, of course, but a deeply incisive one written, not coincidentally in the aftermath of the incredible moral failings of Europe in the Second World War. Camus' message to the reader purses us like the scream of the woman in his memory. High-minded thoughts and inner work are one thing, but all that matters is what you do. The health of our spiritual ideals depends on what we do with our bodies in moments

of truth. It is worth comparing the agony and torture of clements with a more recent example from another French philosopher, Annie Doe for Mendel, who died in 2017, aged 53, rushing into the surf to save two drowning children who are not her own. In her writing, Annie had spoken often of risk, saying it was impossible to live life without risk, and that in fact life is risk. It is in the presence of danger she once said in an interview that we are gifted with a strong incentive for action, dedication, and surpassing oneself. And when on that beach in San Tropez, she was faced with a moment of danger and risk, an

opportunity to turn away or to do good, she committed the full measure of devotion to her ideals. What is better to live as a coward or die as a hero, to fall woefully short of what you know to be right or to fall in the line of duty, and which is more natural to refuse a call from your fellow humans, or to dive in bravely and help them when they need you. Stillness is not an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world, quite the opposite. It's a tool to let you do more good for more people. Neither the Buddhist nor the Stoics believed in what has come to be called original sin, that we are a fallen and flawed

and broken species. On the contrary, they believe we were born to do good. To them, the phrase be natural was the same as do the right thing. For Aristotle, virtue wasn't something contained in the soul, it was how we lived. It was what we did. He called it udymania, human flourishing. A person who makes selfish choices

or acts contrary to their conscience will never be at peace. A person who sits back while others suffer or struggle will never feel good or feel that they have enough, no matter how much they accomplish or how impressive their reputation may be. A person who does good regularly will feel good. A person who contributes to their community will feel like they are a part of one. A person who puts their body to good use, volunteering, protecting, serving, standing up for will not need to treat it like an amusement park to get some thrills.

Virtue is not an abstract notion. We are not clearing our minds and separating the essential from the essential for the purposes of a parlor trick. Nor are we improving ourselves so that we can get richer or more powerful. We are doing it to live better and be better. Every person we meet in every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity to prove that. It's the old Boy Scout motto. Do a good turn daily. Some good turns are big like saving a life or protecting the environment, but good turns can also be small scouts or taught. Like a thoughtful gesture, mowing a neighbor's lawn,

calling 911 when you see something amiss, holding open a door, making friends with the new kid at school. It's the brave who do these things. It's the people who do these things who make the world worth living in. Marcus Aurelius spoke of moving from one unselfish action to another. Only there he said, can we find delight and stillness. In the Bible Matthew 5.6 says that those who do right will be

made full by God, too many believers seem to think that belief is enough. How many people who claim to be of this religion or that one if caught and investigated would be found guilty of living the tenants of love and charity and selflessness. Action is what matters. Pick up the phone and make the call to tell someone what they mean to you. Share your wealth, run for office, pick up the trash you see on the ground. Step in when someone is getting bullied. Step in even if you're scared, even if you might get hurt. Tell the truth, maintain your vows, keep your word, stretch out a hand to someone who has fallen. Do the hard good deeds. You must do the thing you cannot do, Eleanor Roosevelt said. It will be scary. It will not always be easy, but know that

what on the other side of goodness is true stillness. Think of Dorothy Day, and indeed many other less famous Catholic nuns who work themselves to the bone helping other people. While they may have lacked for physical possessions and wealth, they found great comfort in seeing the shelters they had provided in the self-respect they had restored for people whom society had cast aside. Let us compare that to the anxiety

of the helicopter parents who think of nothing, but which preschool to enroll their toddler in or the embezzling business partner who is just one audit away from getting caught. Compare that to the nagging insecurity we feel knowing that we are not living the way we should or that we are not doing enough for other people. If you see fraud and do not say fraud, the philosopher Naseem Taleb has said, you are a fraud.

Worse, you will feel like a fraud and you will never feel proud or happy or confident. Will we fall short of our own standards? Yes. When this happens, we do not need to whip ourselves as Clemens did. We must simply let it instruct and teach us as all injuries do. That's why 12-step groups ask their members to be of service as part of their recovery, not because good deeds can undo the past, but because they help us get out of our heads and in the process help write the script for a better future.

If we want to be good and feel good, we have to do good. There is no escaping this. want to be good and feel good, we have to do good. There is no escaping this. Dive in when you hear the cry for help, reach out when you see the need, do kindness where you can, because you'll have to find a way to live with yourself if you don't. And look, I'm reading this to you in part because of what's happening in the world right now, people are riding and looting in the streets and destroying businesses and hurting people. And that's not okay. And at the same time, what other people are protesting in those same streets, the status quo they are fed up with that they are objecting to is worse, almost beyond imagination for

a society to allow people to be cast aside, to be exploited, to be persecuted, to be victims of brutality and oppression. When you watch that video of George Floyd on the street begging for air, begging for his mother, if that doesn't hit you somewhere deeply central, you are not understanding what stoicism is about. And if you hear me say that right now, and your first objection is to equivocate, to draw distinctions, to try to point out other things, like black on black crime, or how many people were killed

in Chicago, at the same period, or whatever, you're missing the fucking point. The point is that that is really wrong, and that it's been going on for a long time, and it hasn't been central enough in the discussions we've been having, we haven't been central enough in the discussions we've been having. We haven't been doing enough about it.

And because of that, we are complicit in the extreme and the unacceptable examples of that that have been manifested in front of us in video in recent weeks. So what the Stoics would call for us in this moment is bravery, is compassion, is a sense of service, and obligation to the whole, and to make sure these things do not happen anymore. So thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week. If you like the podcast that we do here, and you wanna get it via email every morning,

you can sign up at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free on Amazon music, download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. on music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.