The Daily Stoic - It Begs To Linger | Ryan Holiday Visited The BEST Swimming Pools All Over The World (Here's What He Learned)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them. to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visitdailystoic.com. It's a powerful force you tap into. It's a shield you use to protect yourself.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Many of us use anger in our lives. Productively, we tell ourselves. It's what's driven our career. It's what's behind our activism. It's what allows us to put ourselves out there, that desire to prove someone wrong, to punish some wrongdoer to feel alive. But the problem with anger, as the song we quoted recently puts it,

Starting point is 00:01:27 is that it begs to stick around. As of fuel, anger is both explosive and addictive. Has anyone ever actually felt like they finally did stick it to those doubters and can now rest securely in their accomplishments? Of course not. Anger finds the next target, the next slight to obsess over, the next mole hill to turn into a mountain. It doesn't burn itself out, but it does eventually burn everything around it. The Stoics knew that anger was very dangerous. This is why they warned against revenge. This is why Marcus quoted that line from the now lost Euripides' play to remind himself of the impotence of rage. Why should we feel anger at the world, he asks, as if the world would notice?

Starting point is 00:02:16 Once you let anger into your life, once you let it motivate you, it's very hard to get rid of. It's very hard to find a substitute that measures up. It's hard. to let it go. But imagine a life without anger's presence. Imagine if you had control of your temper. How much better would you be? How much purer would you be? How much lighter would you be? And we actually have two really great reminders, I think. So one is the daily stoic pause and reflect coin, which I've been carrying as my daily carry lately. It's just a reminder. It's got a mirror on the front. Like, what do you think you look like here? But Seneca's line about how delay is the best remedy is the reminder I want with me. And then for many years, we've had our tame your tempered course.

Starting point is 00:03:01 It's an 11-day Stoic deep dive into what they can teach us about anger. It's not that you have an anger problem, or maybe you do. I'm just saying that anger causes problems for all of us. And the Stoics have a lot to teach us about that. And you can get the coin and the course as a bundle right now and say 20 bucks. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check it out. This is an ad by BetterHelp. I have a therapy appointment in two days. It's from 10 to 11. I do it remotely.

Starting point is 00:03:34 So it takes from 10 to 11. I don't have to drive. I don't have to find parking. I don't have to worry about traffic. And I think this is really great because when we can have excuses or when there are impediments or friction to taking care of ourselves, we sometimes take the excuse to not take care of ourselves. And that's why I do online therapy. And that's where today's sponsor comes in.

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Starting point is 00:04:23 Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash daily stoic pod. That's betterh-E-L-P dot com slash daily stoic pot. I'm not saying that the stoics were swimmers. Almost certainly most of them were not. But there is something very stoic about swimming. Sometimes the water's really cold and you don't want to get in. Sometimes there's big waves and it's scary. Sometimes you're nervous about what lurks beneath.

Starting point is 00:04:53 Swimming gets you alone with your own thoughts. Swimming challenges you physically. It challenges you mentally. But if you do it right, if you achieve what the stoics called the smooth flow of life, if you learn to work with the water, not to fight it too hard, there's a tranquility and a mastery and a confidence and a peace and a stillness that comes from it. And that's what I want to talk about in today's episode. I've been swimming since I was a little kid.

Starting point is 00:05:18 I was on a swim team. I try to get in the water every single week, not just in my pool at home, at home, we're in Barton Springs, which is one of my favorite places on Earth, but when I travel also, and I'm so often thinking about Stoic philosophy while I'm in the water, and that's what we're going to talk about today. Mark Surrealius writes a good chunk of meditations looking at the Danube River. He talks about washing off the dust of earthly life in the Roman baths. Seneca takes a cold plunge every New Year's day. The Stilics knew that water was soothing and calm, but

Starting point is 00:05:52 but also invigorating and challenging. But also I found swimming to be the most meditative thing that I do in my life where I've had most of my biggest breakthroughs as a human being trying to apply stoicism in my life. I think there's a reason that every Zen garden has a fountain. There's something about the running of water. There's also something cleansing about water. Whether you grew up around water, whether you know how to swim,

Starting point is 00:06:16 whether you don't, you gotta figure out some way to build, I think, a stoic practice around waters. Of course, it's also a life force for us. If you're not drinking water, eventually you die, right? I think there's a reason that the theme of water runs through the Stoics. What is the role that water has in your life? How is it replenishing and recharging, but also challenging and invigorating it. One of my favorite passages in all of meditations, Mark Surrealis, talks about being the rock that the waves crash over and eventually fall still around.

Starting point is 00:06:51 something really special about water. I just went for this swim in Lake Michigan. But I'm just standing here by the water, listening to the waves, trying to sort of slow myself down. I have a talk I have to give later today. I have to travel later today. I have a bunch of stuff I have to do. But I want to get in that place of stillness. Uthemia, as Seneca talks about, at Tranquility. I wanted to get to a place of peace. Even though everything is crazy, it's slowing down around me and I'm going to be able to do what I have to do for the day. The reason not to let it get to you, Mark Spruillus reminds us, is that it doesn't laugh. He says time and events, they flow past us like a river, at an incredible rate.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Everything is changing. He says nothing is stable and very little actually laugh. It says it would take an idiot to feel self-important, to be irritated, to take any of this as permanent, because it isn't. It's always changing, it's always moving, and you don't know what's coming next. In one of my favorite passages in meditations, Mark Srealis talks about washing off the dust of earthly life. And we know that you visited these ancient springs in a quincum, the Roman camp, in what is now Budapest. And so we wanted to come here. This is Balmorae, the biggest spring, natural spring pool in the world. It's kind of like Barton Springs.

Starting point is 00:08:08 We wanted to jump in. I swam, let's see, about a half mile. And then I went on the high dive a couple times. My wife, Samantha, didn't want to do the high dive yesterday, but she convinced herself to do it this morning, which is fitting, being that this is the trip for the courage book so she worked up the courage to do it jumped off I'm not sure she was actually that pleased but at least she's pleased with herself for doing it kids got in the pool we saw some turtles and some fish

Starting point is 00:08:37 even when you love the water even when you swim all the time even though you know it at some level you almost never like getting in getting in is hard getting in takes some getting used to but you're almost always glad that you did get in it It reminds me of this thing from Musoni's Rufus where he says, you know, when you do something difficult, the labor passes quickly, but the good remains. And he says, you know, when you do something easy or you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, you know, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures. And I think about it's like, I didn't want to get in. It was cold. It was uncomfortable. I didn't like getting splashed. I didn't know how it would feel. But afterwards,

Starting point is 00:09:14 you're always glad you did it. look maybe there's some health benefits to cold plunges people say it's better for their circulation it's better for your immune system it helps you recover honestly i don't know it could all be complete and total bullshit in fact there's a part of me that thinks that it probably is but to me the benefit of a cold plunge is the mental benefit right seneca said we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind the point of the cold is that you are doing something hard you are doing it for an amount of of time that you committed to.

Starting point is 00:09:47 Even though every part of you is screaming to stop, to get out, you do it anyway. That's the muscle that you're building. That's the muscle that you're providing benefits to. The part of your body that wants to quit, but the part of your mind that says, no, I decide. I am in charge. When you crank the handle on the shower,

Starting point is 00:10:03 when you jump in a snow melt river, when you jump in the ocean, when you get in a cold plunge, that's what you're doing. You're saying, I am in charge. I can do hard things. You don't like it while you're doing it, but you like how you feel after. I've been to some pretty incredible places in my life,

Starting point is 00:10:26 but it is almost unbelievable to me that you can still bathe in the hot springs that the Spartans bathed in before they faced Xerxes and a million Persian men at the final stand of Thermopylae. And it's just pouring from the earth. It's still 104 degrees Fahrenheit. It smells terribly like sulfur, but it is just absolutely

Starting point is 00:10:45 surreal and it's free there's not even like an entrance fee or a security guard you just walk in and bathe in a stream that 2,600 or so years ago the bravest warriors who ever lived who gave everything to protect all of western civilization to come you can just get in it and wash away the dirt of earthly life as marcus really has said and that whole thing with michael's was interesting because it started quite benignly yeah he was 12 I started working with him because we had limited pool space like every club in America right the group that he was in practice one time per day and then they practiced on Sundays that was the the best attendant practice everybody would

Starting point is 00:11:32 come yeah Sunday morning everything so my God it's terrible and there were people in the group who would you know Wednesdays was the day off for them when he started and then he got good and I was like well yeah Michael needs to be chowd so he'd come on Wednesdays and he was just going seven days Yeah. But it was like an hour and a half. It wasn't some big deal. Yeah. And he would go play lacrosse and all this stuff. And then he moved into my group and we were still going seven days. And we did that until he was 12, 13, 14, because he was only training one time per day. He wasn't training like, you know, a lot. Then we started doing a little bit more. We put in two doubles a week and stayed on the Sundays because we were just doing it. And we went on a national team trip, one of his very first ones. One of the older guys were on their bus. And I don't even know how we got into this. They're like, hey, Phelps, I bet you. even you train every day. Do you train every day? He's like, yeah. Like, he didn't know any different. Yeah. He's like, do you train on Christmas? And he was like, yeah. And on Christmas, literally, they came in and swam for 30 minutes. We played water polo. It wasn't like a big deal, but it was just

Starting point is 00:12:29 enough to kind of keep it going. And the guys were like, gave him this look that I knew that that was a huge psychological advantage. Yeah. And Michael's like, we're going to keep doing this. They were then terrified of him at that point. And then he just kept going. And you know, you can make the case It's those 52 days a year that other people aren't training. You do that for six years? Sure. Picked up six months. I would think you would want to know.

Starting point is 00:12:54 I think you would want to know what you're capable of, what your limits are. The difficult, challenging things you can do you can endure. Actually, Socrates said this. Of course, we think of him as a wise philosopher, but he was a tough guy. He served in the military. He challenged himself. He tested himself physically. He said, it is a shame to grow old and not know what you're.

Starting point is 00:13:13 body is capable of. He actually said that no citizen was exempt from keeping themselves in peak physical condition. He said, because you might have to serve your country one day. I just think the point is we don't just want to explore our limits intellectually. We don't just want to expand our brains. We got to work on our bodies too. We got to push ourselves physically. We got to do hard things. We got to train ourselves. This miraculous physical specimen, this machine we are inside. We want to see what we can do with it. We want to see what we can make of it. We want to see where it can take us. You don't have to be an elite athlete.

Starting point is 00:13:50 You don't have to be like a strong man, strong woman. You don't have to be that in order to take advantage of what your body is and what your muscles can do for you. Yeah. You know, and it was like that for why we swim, too. Like, I wanted that book to be for people who didn't, obviously it's for swimmers. Yeah. People identify it as I'm a swimmer.

Starting point is 00:14:08 But for people who, even if they are afraid of the water, that, we all have some relationship with water. And in this case, we all have a relationship with our bodies. We all have a relationship with, like, moving through the world, which is what our muscles do. And it's like, it's about capability. It's about action. And so, like, that philosophy of muscle is kind of cool to me. Like, that's what I took away from the process of writing it.

Starting point is 00:14:30 Here, there's a Roman expression. I have it in the book that I'm doing now where they were saying, like, a good education should teach a child, like, about books and how to swim. Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Just like, if you don't know those two things. That was, like, a moral failing if you didn't know how to swim. Yeah. But then you just read about like pretty much like right after that. Just nobody learned how to swim.

Starting point is 00:14:47 Like Benjamin Franklin was considered a fucking weirdo because he knew how to swim and he would swim. Like sailors didn't know how to swim. Yes. Fishermen don't know how to swim. Yeah. It's just like I think that's kind of the point that Socrates was making. It's like you have this thing and you're just remarkably uncurious about imagine you make your living on the ocean and you're like, but I don't go in there. Right.

Starting point is 00:15:09 Like that seems strange. It does seem strange. It's pretty surreal. It's actually warmer in the water that it is outside right now. It's like 70. But more than 70 in the water, and it's like 40 out.

Starting point is 00:15:28 It's pretty freezing. I just had a million-gallon swimming pool filled with endangered fish and soft-shell turtles totally to myself. It was like five bucks to get in here. The best thing, in life truly are, very cheap things, things a lot of people take for granted.

Starting point is 00:15:47 And they usually involve getting out and getting active. I'm in Lake Voliagamene in Greece and one of the crazy parts of this insanely beautiful place is that there are these little fish in the water and they're eating the skin off of your feet. They're eating your dead skin. And it makes me think of that line from Seneca where he said, death isn't a thing that happens at the end. He says, we're wrong to think of death. is something we're moving towards. This is death is happening right now. The point is that we're dying every minute,

Starting point is 00:16:17 we're dying every day. And there's something about this sensation of them eating the skin off of your body, the dead skin off of your body, that makes you realize that you are covered in death. They're getting older, that falling apart, that decay, death. It's not a thing that happens at the end. It's happening now.

Starting point is 00:16:34 We're dying every minute, we're dying every second. We're falling apart every minute, every second. Entropy is working on us. Old age is working on us. death is coming for us in little tiny pieces in the form of fish in the in the form of your hair going gray in the form of your hair falling out in the form of your muscles and bones getting weak even though we can't always perceive it we are always aging we are always dying and that's the stoic lesson of memento mori not just that you could go at any moment but that you are in fact going at every moment and that's why we have to be so conscious of how we spend our time because the way we spend our time is how we are spending our life And quite literally, we are spending our life, our most precious resource, on everything that we do. And to waste it is to waste the most essential thing that there is.

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The Daily Stoic - It Begs To Linger | Ryan Holiday Visited The BEST Swimming Pools All Over The World (Here's What He Learned)

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