The Daily Stoic - There is Only One Thing To Do | Don’t Hide From Your Feelings

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stokeic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics,

Starting point is 00:00:36 from Epipetus Markus, Relius, Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. There is only one theme to do.

Starting point is 00:01:18 It would be wonderful if the Stoics promised you some kind of breakthrough. One that saw for the messy divorce is the unfortunate bankruptcy. one that helped you rehab from the car accident or magically deal with the pandemic that drags on for years and years as Marcus knew well. One that sues you as you sit up, sleep deprived with an infant. The Stoics do actually offer you solutions for these kinds of struggles.

Starting point is 00:01:42 They just don't come as the kind of breakthrough or insight you're necessarily looking for. In 1929, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend Ernest Hemingway about being blocked on the novel that would become tender is the night. Hemingway gave him a great piece of advice, words of timeless wisdom that Fitzgerald almost certainly didn't want to hear. You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless, Hemingway told his friend, there's only one thing to do with a novel, and that is to go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.

Starting point is 00:02:16 Stoicism can't offer you much more than that, because there's not much else to offer in the management of life's inevitable struggles. The way past our problems is through them. This is the best way out, as Robert Frost would later write. Indeed, it was endurance that Marcus drew upon in the Antenine plague during those years on the front lines, during his health issues, through the grief and loss that was visited upon him over and over again. It's how Seneca got through his exile and epictetus through slavery. When things were worst and most helpless, they kept going,

Starting point is 00:02:50 they did not quit. They went on straight through to the end, as Marcus himself would write sprinting through to the finish line unswirving. Fitzgerald found the finish line with his novel four years later, though with his wife Zelda's severe mental health issues in his own chronic alcoholism, one could hardly say the path was unswerving. Still, despite it all Fitzgerald never quit, he continued to write, he continued to work in order to pay Zelda's medical bills in the vain hope that one day she would be cured. In short, he kept going, and so should you. It's the only thing to do. Don't hide from your feelings. This is today's entry in the daily

Starting point is 00:03:37 stoic. 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, and then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand, write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them. You can check out the Daily Stoke Journal anywhere, books are sold and also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoke store at store.dailystoke.com. And our quote today is from Seneca in his essay to Helvia, his mother. It's better to conquer grief, he says, than to deceive it. We've all lost people were close to a

Starting point is 00:04:23 friend, a colleague, a parent, a grandparent, and while we were suffering from our grief, some well-meaning person did their best to take our mind off of it or make us think about something else for a couple hours. However kind these gestures are misguided. The Stokes are stereotyped as suppressing their emotions, but their philosophy was actually intended to teach us to face, to process and deal with emotions immediately instead of running from them. Tempting as it is to deceive yourself or hide from a powerful emotion like grief by telling yourself and other people that you're fine, awareness and understanding are better.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Distraction might be pleasant in the short term by going to the gladiatorial games as a Roman might have done, but focusing is better in the short term by going to the gladiatorial games as a Roman might have done, but focusing is better in the long term. That means facing it now. Process and parse what you are feeling. Remove your expectations, your entitlements, your sense of having been wrong. Find the positive in the situation, but also sit with your pain and accept it. Remembering that it is a part of life, and that is how we conquer grief. I had Kate Boehler on the podcast last year or year before. I know it's been twice, but she has this book called Everything Happens for Reason and other lies I've been told and the point she finds out she

Starting point is 00:05:39 has cancer and all these people come and go, oh, it happened for a reason, everything happens for a reason, and her response was, I'd love to know the reason, right? She was rejecting these sort of platitudes that we give people when they are grieving to try to take their mind off it, we distract them, we want to make them laugh, we say, oh, I've been through that too. There's no way out but through feeling, thinking, dealing with, you know, the Stoics, the Stoics knew grief, as Sennaka was writing that essay to his mother, he was grieving himself. He'd lost a child. As I've been going back through meditations, we have this leather bound edition and I'm rereading it like a fresh copy. And for whatever reason, I was just skipping through it. And I found in all

Starting point is 00:06:26 like in one sitting, I found all the different instances where Marcus was talking about like loss and children, which is extra haunting when you think about how many he lost five, six. We don't know exactly, but almost more of his children did not survive to adulthood than did. He buried five, six children, just the magnitude of that grief. And if we take meditations, then as a much more personal book, a book of a man working through his grief, trying to conquer it not to see it. It's both very humanizing and haunting at the same time. Marcus isn't different than you and I, he's not this magical robot, but he was someone who put in the work to deal with, to think through, to talk about his emotions. I just, I hate the stereotype of the still existsics as being unfeeling. They were feeling they just tried not to be overwhelmed,

Starting point is 00:07:27 overcome paralyzed by those feelings. And part of the way they did it was by working on them. So, you know, this month in the Daily Stoic is about death and grief and mortality. And I think it's important for those of you who are grieving, for those of us who are grieving who have lost someone or may lose someone, you know, it's okay to cry about that. There's a story about Marcus crying about the loss

Starting point is 00:07:51 of one of his tutors. That's a human thing. If you're still crying about a paralyzed by it a year later, how we get some help, you're probably torturing yourself, you're probably doing something that they, the person you are born in than would not dream of wanting or cursing you with So you've got to deal with it. You got to face it

Starting point is 00:08:13 Got to process it. That's the only way out. There is no way out but through that's today's message from the daily stoic and I hope you guys are getting ready for the holidays. I hope you're thinking about your New Year's resolutions. I've got the Daily Stoic New Year New Year challenge coming up here very, very soon. So stay tuned for that and happy holidays. We'll talk soon. That's my momentum, Mori Koy. I think about it all the time. I'm playing with it on my test right now. It's on that carry always. It's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public.

Starting point is 00:08:50 It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different Momento Mori reminders, of course. But if you want to get this one, which we make here in the US, in a mint in Minnesota, it's been in business since 1882. You can check it out in the Daily Stoke store. Or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, The Painted Portrait Man's Street, where we sell them as well.

Starting point is 00:09:09 It's Game Changer, we'll check it out. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add 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 on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will be your resident

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The Daily Stoic - There is Only One Thing To Do | Don’t Hide From Your Feelings

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