The Daily Stoic - Every Day Is A Chance For This | The Present Is All We Possess

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

That was the purpose behind Stoicism, behind the journaling, and the reading, and studying of this philosophy, behind the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge (which starts on Tuesday, the first day of spring)—to use each day as an opportunity to improve yourself action by action, step by step. This might not seem like much, as Zeno said, but it adds up to no small thing.Every one of us wants to improve, wants to be better, wants to have better habits, live better, think better. But most of us wait to launch that business, write that novel, develop that fitness routine, to do what we know is right. We’ll do it when we’re more secure, we say, we’ll do it later, or in the fall, or next year, when things get back to normal. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life, Seneca reminds us. It snatches away the present in exchange for some promised future.Every day is a new season. Every day is spring, whatever hemisphere you’re in. Every day is a chance for a new beginning. That every day we awake, we can choose a new life, a new way, to rededicate ourselves to becoming the best versions of ourselves.As we’ve been saying, this is a chance to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. And that’s what we’re all going to be doing in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It’s designed to push you to examine those parts of your life, those habits, those choices that could move you closer to living your best life. You could have the good life, the life you deserve, right now!Participants will receive:✓ 10 Custom Challenges Delivered Daily (Over 15,000 words of all-new original content)✓ One live Q&A session✓ Printable 10-Day Calendar With custom daily illustrations to track progress✓ Access to a Private Community PlatformIt is a new season, and it can also be the beginning of a new you, too. Give yourself 10 days of improvement and a runway for true, sustainable change.Challenge yourself to spring forward to be the person you know you can be. Don’t wait any longer to live the life you deserve. Head over to dailystoic.com/spring and sign up NOW!-✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you want to focus more on your well-being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical, mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial. You can listen to Audible on your daily walks. You can listen to my audiobooks on your daily walks. And stillness is the key. I have a whole chapter on walking, on walking meditations, on getting outside. And it's one of the things I do when I'm walking. Audible offers a wealth of wellbeing titles to help you get closer to your best life and the best you.

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And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favorite artists of all time, somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her

and engaged with her message, it totally floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator,

translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. Every day is a chance for this. After a long winter, after so many days of putting things off, after so much has piled up, spring comes and gets us moving again. The budding flowers, the sprouting plants, the longer days, the warmer temperatures, these signs of rejuvenation remind us of the cyclical nature of life and the opportunity for growth

and the renewal that accompanies each new season. We start new projects, we get cleaning, we get outside and this is all wonderful. But should this be the only change that a new season ushers in? Epictetus would say that just as one person delights in improving his farm and another his horse, that he delighted in attending

to his own improvement day to day. Delight, not a word you'd expect from Epictetus, but there it is. It can be found in such an unexpected way, not in material things, not in tidying up the garage, not in a hobby, but in oneself, in improving oneself. And that was the purpose of Stoicism, behind the journaling and the reading

and the studying of this philosophy, behind the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, which is gonna start on Tuesday, the first day of spring. It's the idea that we can use each day as an opportunity to improve our self action by action, step by step. This might not seem like much, as Zeno said, but it adds up to no small thing.

Every one of us wants to improve, wants to be better, wants to have better habits, live better, think better. But most of us wait to launch the business, to write the novel, to develop that fitness routine tomorrow. We wait to do what we know is right. We'll do it when we're more secure. We say we'll do it later, or in the fall, or next year, or when things get back to normal.

But putting things off is the biggest waste of life, Seneca reminds us. It snatches away the present in exchange for some promised future. Every day is a new season. Every day is spring, whatever hemisphere you're in. Every day is a chance for a new beginning. Every day that we awake, we can choose a new life,

a new way to rededicate ourselves to becoming the best versions of ourselves. As we've been saying, though, this spring is a chance to begin a fresh, a fresh, a fresh. And that's what we're gonna be doing in the Daily Stoke Spring Forward Challenge. It's designed to push you to examine those parts of your life, those habits, those choices that can move you closer to living your best life. You can have that good life, the life you deserve

right now. It's just a 10-day challenge. It's really short. It's punchy. It's to the point. There's going to be a live Q&A with me. There's an awesome community that we're having and we want this new season to mark a new you. And if you want to join me and thousands of other stoics all over the world doing the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, I'd love to have you join us. You can head over to dailystoic.com slash spring to sign up right now. It's filling up really fast and once we get going,

it's going and you'll wanna be in it with us. It's best to do it live with all of us and trying to think what else you wanna know about it. It's gonna be fun. If you're a Daily Stoke Life member, you get this challenge and all the challenges for free. So sign up there at dailystoaklife.com. And I'm pumped just wrapping up spring break with my family

and then I'll be back in the swing of things to start this with all of you. And I'll see you soon. That's dailystoke.com slash spring. The present is all we possess. This is the March 15th entry in the Daily Stoic. I'm holding the hardcover in my hands, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. But of course, you can get it as an audiobook, you can get it as an ebook, we've even got

a cool leather edition in the Daily Stoke store. And today's quote is Marcus Aurelius Meditations 214. So pretty early in meditations. It's one of the great quotes in the book. He says, were you to live 3000 years or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living. And no one ever lives a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing. The longest and the shortest then amount to the same, for the present moment lasts the

same for all, and as all anyone possesses, no one can lose either the past or the future, for how can someone be deprived of what's not theirs? Today notice how often you look for more, that is wanting the past to be more than what it was, different, better, still here, etc. or wanting the future to unfold exactly as you expect, with hardly a thought as to how that might affect other people. When you do this, you're neglecting the present moment. Talk about ungrateful. There's a saying attributed to Bill Kean, the cartoonist, worth remembering.

Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present. This present is in our possession, but it has an expiration date, quickly approaching one. If you enjoy all of it, it will be enough. It can last a whole lifetime. I had two thoughts. I mean, obviously, I wrote the Daily Stoke now, eight plus years ago, but I was thinking as sometimes when I read them out loud to you guys, I go, oh, I like that, maybe I tweet this, here's what I would add.

I just had this experience going back through the obstacles away and there's just little things that I've picked up since then that I would add. Like, and when I hear like, oh, maybe I'd add this or that, I put it down on the note cards. There's two little things, actually three. I'll give you two. The first two come from poems by William Blake.

He says, he who binds himself to a joy does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternities sunrise. And then the other one is from a longer poem, Auguries of Innocence, one of my favorites, but it says, to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower,

hold infinity in the palm of your hand, an eternity in an hour. It's this idea that the present is all that there is, but the present is so, so much. And then my favorite, I've talked about my love of the singer, Bon Iver. I'm pulling this up so I don't mess it up because his lyrics are famously sort of enigmatic, but my favorite Bon Iver songs is Blood Bank. Actually, we played it as my wedding.

I think we played it either when I walked down and then I waited for my wife. I think that's when we played it. Maybe I'm playing the whole intro. I forget, but I remember it's one of the songs we picked. But he says, Then the snow started falling. We were stuck out in your car, you were rubbing both my hands, chewing on a candy bar. You said, ain't this just like the present

to be showing up like this? As the moon wane to crescent, we started to kiss. Anyways, these are two, I'm getting a little outside of Stoicism here, I guess, getting pretty poetic. But what I like about both of those is they're just sort of showing the infinite, the mystery, the wonderfulness of the present, right? We skip over it because we want what's next,

we're worried about what's next and we don't want what's next. Or we're dwelling on the past, ruminating on the past, regretting the past. And what we're ignoring is the beauty and the wonderfulness and the mystery and the absurdity and the joy and the fun and the ordinariness of the moment that we're in. Right now. And when we slow down, when we embrace it, when we show up for it, when we're in it, we get that.

I have a big chapter on being present and stillness is the key. I talk about Marina Abramovich in her presentation, The Artist is Present, where she just sat there and just was there, not doing anything, not working, not on her phone, not, she was just there for hours and hours and hours and people came and sat in front of her

and it was overwhelming and emotional and transcendent. It was the kind of things that Blake was talking about and Bon Iver was talking about. It just, just was wonderful. And that's what the present is. Even when the world is falling apart, even when what we know is coming up next is not great, think about what the year could hold for us,

the direction things are going. But as I play with my kids or I brush their hair, or I was just in the swimming pool and I was looking up at the stars. You go, man, this is wonderful. I'm just gonna be here in this, at this moment, soak it in. That's what Seneca talks about.

Let me give you this other quote. I know I'm just quoting a bunch today, but it's one of my favorite quotes from Seneca. He says, snatch the pleasures your children bring, let your children in turn find delight in you and drain joy to the dregs without delay. No promise has been given you for this night. He says, no, even that's too long. No promise has been given even for this hour. But this minute, the present you're in, whatever time span you're going to define the present, that has been given to you.

You're in it right now. So actually be in it. Be in all of it. Be all the way in it. That's today's somewhat rambling message, and I'll leave you there. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store, you can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, the obstacles away, it goes the

enemy stillness is the key, the leather bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com. 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.

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