The Daily Stoic - Today, Let This Be The Answer
Episode Date: September 11, 2024Today, on the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, let us be full of love. Let us tell those we love that we absolutely and totally love them.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox d...aily? 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.
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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 Podcast. and wisdom, everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy
that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailysteal.com.
On this day, 22 years ago, Brian Sweeney was a passenger trapped on hijacked United Airlines flight 175. He knew
something was wrong, but he could not have fully understood that he and so many others were about
to be murdered in one of the most hateful and deranged acts of terrorism in history.
But in those final few short minutes of his life, he managed to leave a beautiful message
on his wife's voicemail. It's you, old Mr. Stein.
Listen, on an airplane that's on hijack,
that things don't go well.
I'm looking to just want you to know
I absolutely love you.
I want you to be good, so happy to sign.
Same to my parents and everybody,
that I just totally love you,
and I'll see you in December.
Bye, babe.
What can I call you?, Sextus. Bye, babe. I'll call you.
In book one of Meditations where Marcus Riles catalogs
the most important things he learned throughout his life,
he said that he learned from a teacher named Sextus
to be free of passion, yet full of love.
Imagine the terror of that moment.
Yet when you hear Brian's voice coming through the phone,
there's not a trace of
fear. It's free of passion, free of anger, free of despair, free of everything, yet full of love.
Because everything else has been stripped away, rendered irrelevant and insignificant. Pure love,
Seneca said, careless of all other things, kindles the soul, makes us selfless, it emboldens us, makes us courageous,
inspires us to be strong, instills us with purpose. It doesn't always win, as Sweeney's tragic death
reminds us, but it is an antidote to terror and cruelty and evil. It is the thing that keeps going,
that lives on after us, that brings meaning and comfort, even in the worst of situations.
So today on the anniversary of 9-11,
let us, as Marcus Aurelius said and Sweeney was,
let us be full of love.
Let us tell those we love that we totally love them.
Let us bring love to every situation we face.
Indeed, there is almost no situation in which passion helps,
but almost every situation is made better when it is full of love.
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