The Daily Stoic - What Matters Is What You Can Do In The Moment | Check Your Privilege

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Epictetus didn’t care what you had read. He didn’t care if you had made it through the densest writings of Chryssipus. Marcus Aurelius didn’t care what your job was, what your education was, what your authority was.What mattered was who you were–in your actual life.---And in today's reading from The Daily Stoic, Ryan discusses the value of taking a step back to asses how privileged you really are in the grand scheme of life, and how that will put you one step closer toward helping other people.✉️ 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.

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 Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, it 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 matters is what you can do in the moment.

Epic Titus didn't care what you read. He didn't care if you'd made it through the densest writings of Christ's sipus. Arches of Realist didn't care what your job was, what your education was, what your authority was, what mattered was who you were in your actual life. On a recent episode of the Daily Stoke podcast, the great Sam Harris explained something similar. He said, it didn't matter what peak experiences you'd had, what insights you'd been able to come up with in meditation, how enlightened you felt after all the years of practice and study. What really counted, he said, was what you could muster in the course of ordinary day to day life, or more specifically

in any one present moment. He was saying that mindfulness isn't this abstract thing. It isn't some recreational activity either. Mindfulness is what you're able to draw on when you get distracted, or when you're tempted, or when you're cut off in traffic. When you get a bit of terrible news, when your back pain flares up. Harris wasn't claiming to be perfect at this himself nor is he expecting anyone else to.

He was just making the point that true stoses and true zen, true enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, is something that exists only in the present moment. It's something that exists right now that you're either drawing on or you're not. You can talk about your philosophy all you want, as Epictetus said, what matters is the degree to which you are able to embody it big and small in ordinary and extraordinary situations alike. This is a high bar.

It is also a bar that you're constantly getting a new shot at every moment you're alive. So aim high. And if you miss, dust yourself off and try again. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonder East Podcast Business Wars. And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stare down family drama and financial disasters, listen to business wars on Amazon music

or wherever you get your podcasts. daily stoic. And today's quote comes to us from Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epipetus. Some people are sharp and others are dull. Some are raised in a better environment, others in worse. The latter having inferior brains, having inferior habits and nurture will require more, by the way of proof and careful instruction, to master these teachings, and to be formed by them. In the same way that bodies in a bad state must be given a great deal of care when perfect health is sought. At the end of a frustrating exchange, you might find yourself thinking, this person is such an idiot, we're asking, why can't they just do things right? But not everyone has had the advantages that you've had. That's not to say that your life has been easy. You've just had a head start over some people. And that's why it is our duty to understand and be patient with others. Philosophy

is a spiritual formation, care of the soul, some need more care than others. Just as some have a better metabolism or were born taller than others. The more forgiving and tolerant you can be of others, the more you can be aware of your various privileges and advantages, the more helpful and patient you will be. And again, I think it's worth pointing out here that Epic Titus was taught by Moussoni's Rufus. So Moussoni's Rufus is this teacher, he's known as the Roman Socrates, he's great and wise and brilliant. And he teaches the best and the brightest of Rome, most of which would be rich, powerful, privileged people, and it somehow he makes room in his classroom for epictetus. And you think about where epictetus came from. He walks with a limp because of

the years in slavery, because the torture he underwent, you think about the deprivation, the struggle, but Musoni's Rufus finds not just a way to reach epitails, but make him great. He's patient with them. He encourages them. And this isn't the only evidence we have of Musoni's Rufus, sort of understanding his own privilege and being generous and open-minded. Musoni's Rufus also famously says that women should be taught philosophy, which is a remarkably progressive thing at that time. So I know like when should be taught philosophy, which was a remarkably progressive thing at that time. So I know like when people hear checker approach, this was a less loaded term I used as the title of this section when I wrote the book in 2015 and came out in 2016.

I get people have an instinctive reaction, it's always woke or whatever. But the truth is we are all privileged in some form or another. And how do I know this? Because you are listening to this on a podcast, which means you have a smartphone. Maybe you're driving in a car, means you're commuting to a job in a city that has public transportation. And there are literally billions of people for whom that is not just not true, whom that is not just not true, but almost incomprehensibly luxurious and wonderful. So then they could not even conceive of doing some of the things that you take for granted. And then even in the context of like, let's say you had a super hard life and I tried to make that caveat in the thing, maybe you're tall, maybe you're beautiful, maybe your

parents actually loved you as a child, right? Maybe you haven't been horribly abused, or maybe you were horribly abused, but not as horribly as other people have. Right? We all have privileges in our life. We all have advantages, right? We all have things that give us a light up in the world. And that's not to say that the other

things haven't happened. It's one to be grateful for those things and to be patient with people that don't have those things, right? And to try to sprinkle the advantages we have to share it, to spread the wealth, to lift others up, and to be patient and forgiving and understanding with the people who have not been blessed the way that we have. To be like Musoneus Rufus, to be able to say Musoneus Rufus was powerful and important and had access to the best and the brightest, and his greatest legacy was this former slave that he helped. Then through helping that former slave, he helped not just that person,

not just improve their life, but had an immediate impact then through Marcus Aurelius and through you and I today, we would not be listening to this, we're it not for the generosity and patience and understanding of Musone's roof is too epictetus. And I think that's a wonderful thing to emulate and to pay forward.

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