The Daily Stoic - What Gets The Best Part of Your Day? | Kindness Is Always The Right Response

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

In those first moments you’re awake, how do you decide to start this fresh day? By reaching for the phone, for social media? We fill the sunlight hours with meetings, spending them all indoors. We wait until after school, after a long stint at the office, to try to spend quality time at home. We pick up a book for a few minutes before we close our eyes to sleep, already tired, already fried.It’s insane. Both Seneca and Marcus Aurelius lamented at the quickness with which ambitious professionals will promise up all their time to the most trivial of work pursuits.---And in today's reading from The Daily Stoic, Ryan discusses why kindness is invincible only when it is sincere.📺 You can watch and listen to the video of Ryan's interview with Anthony Everett at youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ 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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. 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 in the Heart of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and a literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, I will give you a quick meditation from the Stokes with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn

these words into works. What gets the best part of your day? In those first moments you're awake, how do you decide to start this fresh day? By reaching for the phone, for social media, we feel the sunlight hours with meetings, spending them all indoors. We wait until after school, after a long stint at the office to try to spend quality time at home. We pick up a book for a few minutes. We close our eyes to sleep, already tired, already

fried. It's insane. Both Seneca and Marcus lamented at the quickness with which ambitious professionals will promise up all their time to the most trivial of work pursuits. Senna could talk about how philosophy gets the time left over, not the other way around. More, he said, was the fact that all the wisest people in the world have been unable to explain why we are so willing to waste our time giving it away to anyone who demands it from us. Marcus talked about treating philosophy as his real mother, not some guardian. He talked about getting up early and seizing the day, doing what nature and duty demanded of him, not what was easy or pleasurable. The novelist Philip Meyer, whose book, The Sun, is an incredible read,

and actually just did a wonderful interview on the Daily Stoke podcast in the new studio. So you can check that out. He once said, you have to be careful about to what and to whom you are giving the best part of your day. Perfectly said, we get only so many hours and a day, so many days in a life, to what and to whom will we give them to? Philosophy, self improvement, that has to be at the top of that list. So do our duties to the common good to the people we love. If to start the day off right, start your life off right, don't tell yourself you'll get to it later. Do the important stuff now. Do the hard stuff now. Be with the people who matter now. Not later. Give it. give them the best part of your day.

And do listen to the new interview with Philip Meyer, just came out and you can actually watch a video version of it in the new studio at youtube.com slash daily stoic podcast. It's funny, I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time. They've just gotten back into it. And I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading, they're reading more than ever and I go, let me guess, you listen, audiobooks don't you? And it's true and almost invariably they listen to them on Audible.

That's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs, and of course, ancient philosophy, all my books are available on audio, read by me for the most part. Audible lets you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app, you'll always find the best of what you love, or something new to discover, and as an Audible member you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including the latest bestsellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, exciting new voices in audio. You can check out Stillness is the key, the daily dad I just recorded.

So that's up on Audible now. Coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the obstacle is the way audiobooks. So all those are available and new members can try Audible for free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500. That's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500. Kindness is always the right response. This is the May 12th entry from the daily stoic. Kindness is invincible only when it's sincere, with no hypocrisy or faking.

For what even can the most malicious person do if you keep showing kindness, and if given the chance you gently point out where they went wrong? Right? Stay with trying to harm you. This is Marcus Aurelis's Meditations, 1118. What if the next time you were treated poorly? You didn't just restrain yourself from fighting back. What if you responded with unmitigated sincere kindness?

What if you could, as the Bible says, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you? What kind of effect do you think that would have? The Bible says that when you can do something nice and caring to a hateful enemy, it is like heaping burning coals on their head. The expected reaction to hatred is more hatred. When someone says something pointed or mean today, they're expecting you to respond and kind. Not with kindness. And when that doesn't happen, they're embarrassed. not with kindness. And when that doesn't happen, they're embarrassed. It's a shock to their system. It makes them and do you better.

Rudeness, meanness, cruelty. These are a mask for deep-seated weakness. And kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength. You have that strength. Use it. I read a book recently, not recently, maybe six, seven months ago about a book by James Peck, who was one of the freedom writers. In fact, the book is called Freedom Rides. And I think we accidentally ordered a bunch of copies for the painting portion. I think we still have some, so check it out if you want to. But it's his memory. James Peck was one of the few white freedom writers, one of the early white participants in passive resistance to the horrendous injustice that was segregation

in Jim Crow in the American South. And in the book, he talks a handful of times about when he's being attacked, he's attacked all these different occasions. And how in the middle of being beaten or bullied or attacked or whatever, he would often say something to the person attacking him. He'd ask them a question or he wouldn't respond to an insult. He'd say something nice. And then how often this was a record scratch scratch moment. I don't know, like in some cases it was like shake the person out of their sort of spiral

of rage and hatred because like they just expected to get nastiness back. And when they didn't, it almost, it didn't always work of course, but it was like, whoa, what am I doing? Who is it? It's kind of like reminded them, oh, this is a human being I'm about to do this. Do not this abstraction that I've projected all this stuff to. Non-violence, of course, is the highest expression of this sort of biblical wisdom,

the Christ-like suggestion of turning the other cheek. It's extraordinarily difficult to do. And, you know, the people in the civil rights movement, they didn't just hear about this once and then magically become these saints. There was like real training, one of the amazing stories and I tell this actually in the new book. There's a scene where where Martin Luther King is attacked on stage as he's speaking to a large leadership conference in the civil rights movement. And he's being beaten by this Nazi, a literal member of the American Nazi party. And and the crowd watches like, is he going to fight back? Is he going to lift his

hands to protect themselves? And they know the incredible discipline in which Martin Luther King drops his hands, like actually makes himself less defended. And again, that took, that was a lifetime of training and meditation and planning and experience that gets them. They're not unlike the training that a special forces operator would have, you know, under fire. And, and then when, when the person is apprehended, Martin Luther King insists that he not be hurt, he takes him to a back room, not to beat the crap out of him, not to, not to neutralize this threat, which this threat, which Malcolm X would say he ought to have done, but he has a pleasant conversation with him. And again, that's a record scratch, like the amount of discipline that that takes. I'm not asking that of you because I'm not sure I could give it myself.

But Seneca's point that, look, everyone we meet is an opportunity for kindness. But to see these moments when we're provoked, when we're attacked, when we are treated unfairly, when we are abused, that makes the kindness all the greater, all the more impressive. And I want you to see that not as a weakness, but as a part of those disciplines of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Martin Luther King realizes that, you know, blacks and believers in racial equality in the United States were hopelessly outnumbered that the forces of segregation in many cases had control of the police and the military and that it was insane to

try to fight that violence with violence. So he decided to treat it instead with kindness, with grace, with forgiveness, with discipline. And in the end, it was the only thing that made a difference. I'm not perfect at this. I respond to provocations and insults and attacks. It's never really to my benefit. I almost always regret it. It's not the kind thing to do.

It's easy to have a comeback. It's easy to dunk on the idiot who's attacking you. It's therapeutic and cathartic even, but it doesn't help us move forward. It's not a great look. It certainly doesn't change their mind. So let's focus today on meeting everyone and everything with kindness, especially particularly unkindness. Let's meet that kindness with unkindness.

See what kind of difference it makes. Let's see who it stops short and whose attention it catches. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoke 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. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take

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