The Daily Stoic - What Marcus Learned From His Mother | 6 Stoic Lessons In Stillness

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

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For tickets go to shawfest.com. 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, visit DailyStelic.com. The history of stoicism is obviously a very male-centric thing. And in today's episode,

I wanted to talk about where Marcus learned to be Marcus. And the answer is he learned from his mother. Mark Zerullis' biographers to talk about where Marcus learned to be Marcus. And the answer is he learned from his mother. Marcus Rufus' biographers all talk about how Marcus was very much a product of his mentors and tutors. We've talked about his adopted father and his predecessor Antoninus. We've talked about his rhetoric teacher, Cornelius Fronto. We've talked about the stoke teacher who introduced him

to Epictetus, Junius Rusticus. And while all three of these were crucial influences, they didn't enter Marcus's life until he was already chosen as the successor to the throne at age 17. Before then, there was really only one person who shaped who Marcus became. And it wasn't his birth father who died when Marcus was just three.

It was his mother. In meditations, Marcus writes how often he thinks about his mother. And when he does, how he thinks about her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability, he says, not only to not do wrong, but even to conceive of doing it, the simple way that she lived and not in the least like the rich.

So where did Marcus get his profound and his lifelong commitment to doing the right thing, to kindness, right thing, to kindness, to charity, to justice? It was from her. "'Only one thing is important,' Marcus Aurelius writes elsewhere in Meditations, "'to behave throughout your life towards the liars

and crooks around you with kindness, honesty, and justice.'" That was him channeling his mom. For all our debates about how to do good in the world, about what rules create a fair system, Marcus learned from his mother that doing the right thing was pretty simple. You have to be kind. You have to avoid the corruption

that can follow wealth and power. You have to keep your heart from hardening. You have to do what's right, not just because there are consequences for doing wrong, but because it's inconceivable for you to be the kind of person who would try to get away with something. We do what's but because it's inconceivable for you to be the kind of person who would try to get away with something. We do what's right because it's right,

and we should do it right now. I'm celebrating Mother's Day with my wife and my in-laws. I'm doing my best to live up to Marcus Riles' mom's example, Marcus Riles' example, and the example from my own family, and I hope you do the same. I would never say I'm glad something like a pandemic happened. I would never want to dismiss the tragedy or the disruption or the loss. But when I think about what was happening five years ago, as I think about my life shutting down in March and April of 2020,

I actually do feel a kind of gratitude. In fact, a profound sense of gratitude because I see how the pandemic changed me. I see what it taught me. I see the trajectory that it put me on. I'm not talking here about the resurgence of stoicism that came out of the pandemic, which has been both inspiring and exciting and exhausting in some ways.

Obviously, it's good for business also. What I'm talking about is how deeply those early, strange and quiet months where myself and the rest of the world were forced to slow down and stay put. I'm grateful for how that recalibrated what I value, what I prioritize, what I want my life to look like. And here we are, you know, five or so years removed from that, or everything is back to normal, and that feels far away. And that's crazy to me, because normal, how things were before, I think was actually very far from ideal. I think was actually very far from ideal. In March of 2020, as the social distancing and the lockdowns started, what I did, my

wife and two sons, we basically just settled into our ranch, which is on the outskirts of Austin. And we lived on this ranch for a long time, at least five years. But we suddenly lived there in a way that we really hadn't before. We were living there without commutes, without trips to the store, without weekly trips to the airport.

I mean, one of the reasons we moved to Bastrop County, as opposed to say, Dripping Springs or other places that people near Austin have ranches, is because of how easy I could zip to and from the airport. So I travel a lot for my job and suddenly I'm not waking up in hotel rooms. We're not spending so much time apart. In fact, I would spend literally hundreds and hundreds of days in a row. My family, we would all do that together and I think I was home in one place together longer than I had ever been ever in my life, because my parents were busy people themselves.

I was gone a lot as a kid too. And so suddenly I'm free of the mental load and the logistics and the scheduling and the planning and the packing, worrying about where I've gotta be next. And you know, the part that keeps us from being fully present. I mean, even as a writer, when I am home,

I'm sometimes somewhere else. But suddenly, every single day, rain or shine, I'm taking my boys for a long walk in the morning. We're doing their naps in the running stroller or a bike trailer in the afternoon. In the evening, we're going for a family walk during golden hour. We're in the pool together every day.

We're eating every meal together. I'm never missing bath time or bedtime. I think about how many miles we put on those strollers, how many miles I put on my bike, how many miles I put on my shoes, how much time we spent in the woods, how many sunrises and sunsets we got, how many blackberries we picked, how many fish we caught. And look, again, I understand this is all very privileged. Many people had it quite badly during COVID. Not just like immuno-compromised people,

but my sister spent the pandemic in an apartment in Brooklyn. My grandmother spent it in a nursing home. My friends were doctors and paramedics and National Guard people who were called up, spent it at the border. People were in warehouses and slaughterhouses in places and conditions they shouldn't have had to be in.

There were delivery drivers. You know, other people lost their livelihood entirely. So I get my experience was privileged, but that's my point. I am trying to articulate what I realize is a profound privilege. Because suddenly I'm seeing my home in a new way. That was something that struck us profoundly in those first months of the pandemic, like

just how beautiful that spring was. And we also were struck by how new it felt to us, even though we'd lived there for five years. It's that we had never spent enough days in a row in March and April at home that we could fully watch those trees go from bare to buds to leaves to the forest that they are a good chunk of the year. You know, we'd missed Blackberry season most years. We got home after Golden Hour most days. And now we were noticing the things that we weren't even noticing that we were missing

before. Those, you know, the shift in the light through the windows over the course of the day, the birds we hadn't noticed or known were there. I just read this really good book by Chloe Dalton. She's a political policy advisor in the UK and she spent the pandemic at a house in the countryside in England. And she finds herself on a walk one day and she discovers a Leverette which is like a baby wild hair She nurses it back to life and what ensues is this kind of beautiful moving friendship the rabbit or the hair becomes this kind of Free-range companion it hops around the house

It snoozes by her side runs in and out of the fields when she calls it watches it get into mischief around the house at one Point it even trusts her so much it comes back inside and has babies. It's a beautiful book, I loved it. One of the things that I was struck by is she realizes that these aren't particularly well known or well studied animals because they're sort of just like squirrels, nobody cares about them.

And so she ends up reading these research papers but also poetry and ancient authors to find out what they eat, how you take care of them, what they do. And after spending these hundreds of hundreds of hours, quiet hours with this levurette, she learns to understand not just it, but how it sees the world. That's one of my favorite words, this word umwelt,

which basically means like how another animal perceives reality. And as a result, she comes to understand her home and the English countryside differently. She says that she felt this new attentiveness to nature, which was no less wonderful to her despite being totally unoriginal, right? It's obviously timeless nature. For many years, she said, just like for me, the seasons had passed by. The rhythms of it were disrupted by her travel and her modern devices, but that watching

it up close, watching it slowly, watching it day to day, she got finally beneath the surface. She was only interested before in whether it was like dry enough to go for a walk or warm enough to eat outside. She didn't know the birds or the trees, but suddenly she's understanding it deeper, more profoundly, more intimately

in a way that she never could have before. The rhythms of life and nature and the language it speaks. I was struck by that on my ranch too. And I feel grateful to have had that experience. And you know, Mark Sturlus does this in meditation, see, you can see him sort of not showing off, but articulating the things you've noticed, he says that the way that the stock of grain bends low under its own weight

talks about the furrowed brow of the lion. The flecks of foam on a boar's mouth talks about the way that an olive falls right from the tree but also decomposes and decays on the ground. He's got this sort of poet's eye that he didn't have before. And this is a powerful, I think, philosophical and artistic view of existence. Funny, I actually wrote about this in Stillness is the Key. I was working on stillness in 2018 and 2019, and I talk a lot about Churchill and his relationship with time and the natural world and how that was changed by his discovery of painting. He has this nervous breakdown after World War I. His sister-in-law gives her like a children's painting set. And she sees he's like this kettle of stress.

And she says, check this out, try this. Maybe it'll work for you. And he starts to paint. And he talks about this. He writes a book later called Painting as a Pastime, where he says that painting like all good hobbies gave him this heightened sense of observation of nature. And that that's one of the chief delights

that came to him through his practice. And I think it's funny, he's 40 when this happens. He'd been an artist his whole life as a writer, but he just wasn't as perceptive as he could have been. And that perception is honed by getting out and painting these natural scenes. He'd also, he'd go through museums and try to mimic and remember paintings from memory.

It's just, it forces him to see and interact with the world in a different way. It gets him outside of his comfort zone and thus gives him a new perspective. Obviously I wrote about all this in Stillness is the Key, but I didn't know as I was finishing that very busy book tour. And actually I realized in the early days of the pandemic

that I, in late January of 2020, I passed through the Venice airport on the same day that those Chinese tourists from Wuhan were also passing through. So it was sort of a narrow miss for me. I was on this very busy book tour about stillness and I didn't understand fully how the world was about to tell me and show me what stillness actually looked like.

When COVID brings everything to a screeching, unprecedented stop, when it stripped everything down and broke it apart, what it did was it forced me, and I think other people all over the world, to really see what am I doing? Is this the life that I want? Do I like where I live? To think about things when you're not thinking

about catching that next plane or battling traffic or preparing for this meeting or that meeting. There were no meetings, there were no dinners out, there were no get togethers. Suddenly the pressing deadlines were not so pressing in light of what was happening in the world. And Chloe Dalton talked about that in the Raising Hair book. She talked about her experience with this animal as the privilege of an experience out of the ordinary. As beautiful and true as that is, I think it's interesting that what most of us did with that experience was we complained about it,

we resented it, we fought about it, we argued with people about it, we spent more time on social media because of it. And then we wanted things to go back to normal, which again is silly because the way things were before is not how they were supposed to be. The pandemic was for me not just a lesson in ataraxia or stillness, like here's what happens when you slow a way down,

but it's also a lesson in this idea of amor fati, accepting that this is happening, that no amount of calling it mean names or wishing it was otherwise or ruminating on how it could have gone differently, it doesn't change that this is the circumstance that you're in right now. So what are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna make of it? Who is it going to make you? These are the far more critical questions.

And yet, you know, we wasted so much of our energy asking precisely the opposite of those questions. I remember thinking in those early days of some advice I got from Robert Greene, which I actually have framed on a little note card on my wall, he said, you know, a live time or dead time. That's the choice. Is this gonna be a live time for you or dead time for you?

And I don't think he just meant like, is this gonna be productive for you? He was talking early on in my career, you know, like what kind of pages are you gonna have show for this? But how are you gonna live? If you just were sitting around waiting for this thing to go away, that's a bad use of your time.

As you are killing time, that time is killing you. And who knows, something might kill you soon enough and you're going to look back and regret how you wasted two weeks, let alone two years. So how are you going to spend that time? I just thought about that. This is a unique moment. These are unprecedented circumstances, though in fact they are pretty precedent. But this is a weird moment. How am I showing up for this moment? What do I have to show for this moment? Am I being present for this moment? That's what I thought about.

I think about what I'm grateful for with the pandemic. I'm grateful that it forced me to confront the reality of how many things I didn't actually have to do. How many things weren't, use Marcus really system weren't essential Right Marcus really says when you eliminate the in a century you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better I guess I just thought a lot of the things that I was doing in January 2020 were really essential and I didn't realize Until I eliminated them and I got the double benefit of doing other things better that I I've been way out of whack because clearly so when so many of the things

that we thought we had to do went away and the world didn't actually fall apart, you realize, oh, you didn't actually have to do them. And that we're better and happier in many cases when we don't. I think it was on a lot of those walks, honestly, that thoughts started to seep in about what was important, what I wanted my life to look like,

what I wanted my calendar to look like, what I wanted my calendar to look like, why my calendar had gotten the way that it had gotten, why certain assumptions were built into what I said yes to and what I said no to. You know, opportunity costs are something that are hard to calculate, right? You know that by focusing on this, it's costing you something over here,

but it's not until you remove this that you can sometimes very clearly see what it was doing over here. And when everything went to zero there, I was able to see how much the busyness, how much the noise, how much the skewed priorities were costing me as a writer and also as a human being, like my own health, and then also as a parent, as a spouse.

I suspect that why a lot of people moved during the pandemic wasn't so much a political decision as like they were actually spending time in the place that they purported to live and they were experiencing it for the first time, experiencing what they in many cases didn't like about it and then realizing that life was short and that they shouldn't continue going on living this way if it wasn't working. and that they shouldn't continue going on living this way if it wasn't working. Obviously, I write a lot about history in my books. It can be tempting when you write about history to just see it all as a foregone conclusion, to see it as what simply was bound to happen. I'm grateful going through these last couple years seeing how differently it could have gone,

how differently it should have gone, seeing why it went the way that it went. That also shaped my sense of stoic justice, that the choices we make as individuals, as leaders, as collective groups, it has a huge impact. There are people not alive today because of decisions we made as a society, and that that was preventable, and that we have an obligation, a duty to come together and to try to do the best we can to do it differently. And also though that history in the present moment is also history or history to be. It's not fun, right? You could say, oh the last five years were rough or not normal. But show me a period of history, show me five years where things were normal, where things weren't happening.

Show me a period of history that actually was fun, that wasn't filled with loss and stupidity and conflict and disaster and setbacks and unexpected events. That's what history is. And it's not fun. It wouldn't have been fun to be Marcus Aurelius or Zeno or Seneca. In terms of, it wasn't actually a golden age. It's always been rough.

It's always been uncertain. It's always been crazy. And that that's what this moment is now too. And that this is your chance. You're lucky to live through interesting times. It brings out the best in us. To me, Stoicism is saying, this is the moment I'm in and I'm gonna make the most of it.

I'm not gonna be swept away by this period of time. I'm not gonna be disrupted or broken by it. I'm gonna rise. I'm gonna meet this occasion. And when things are easy and simple and straightforward, you don't get that. Epictetus talked about how when you face adversity or difficulty to say, hey, I'm being paired with a strong sparring partner here.

And that this is how I become Olympic class material. I try to think about that during the pandemic, that hey, this is making me better. This is making me stronger. This is making me wiser. This is teaching me about human nature. This is teaching me to develop skills and coping mechanisms that I wouldn't have had had things gone differently. There was an expression in Vietnam for the soldiers when things would happen, they would

just go, there it is. It was their sort of way of accepting their overall powerlessness over their fate and their circumstances. And that seems tragic, but it's also pretty normal. It's pretty straight down the middle stoicism that most things are not in our control. And our job is not to argue about why they happened or whether it's fair that they happened or whose fault it was that it happened,

but to say, there it is, it is happening, here it is. And what am I gonna do about it? How am I gonna respond to it? And the Stoics have this idea of ascent. And I think day to day, especially early on, but day to day, the pandemic was an exercise in ascent. You are not the president, you are not a world leader, you are not a scientist, you are not a frontline responder,

you are not an expert. Your job is to accept what is happening as what is happening because it is happening. Your job is to figure out how to thrive within those circumstances, how to make the most of those circumstances, how to rise to meet those challenges. That's what Stoicism is about. That's what the obstacle is the way means as a philosophy. There it is. Here it is a philosophy. There it is. Here it is.

It is what it is. A pandemic, a virus, moves of the economy, the moves of the government, they don't care about you. They are indifferent to you. And in that sense, you become indifferent to them in return. To say, okay, Mark Sriyas talks about how adaptability is saying, this is what I wanted. This is what I needed.

This is just what I was looking for. And that's what I tried to say. That's what I tried to practice. And I tried to tell myself as sort of a meta lesson, this is practice in doing that, right? We don't control that it happened, but we control what we do with the materials we have been given. We control our ability to turn obstacles into fuel. That's what the Stoics are saying.

That's what Amor Fati is. In our household, because of some health issues and because I had the physical space and we had financial comfort and because my in-person work was not essential, I just didn't want to be responsible for getting people together and getting anyone sick. And so we kind of kept at that social distancing maybe longer than most. I turned down most travel. I didn't go to really

any conferences. I just stayed at home or around home with my people. And we let our employees keep working remotely. And this was actually one of the best decisions that I ever made. Because I grew as a parent. I grew as an equal parent. I got a lot of reading and writing and running done. As I said, I grew to really love where we lived. And Dalton talks about this in her book too. She said that she's so glad that she didn't leave for the city the moment it became possible. She says she was grateful for every additional day that she spent gazing out the window, following the lever, taking care of it. That if she hadn't, she wouldn't have seen the babies being born. She wouldn't have built the relationship, not just with the animal,

but with people around the animal and with the land that it was all happening on. And she talks about the unexpected, uncomplicated joy and learning not to tamp down on the emotions that it generated. And she says she wouldn't have gotten to see this different perspective of her life. And so she's grateful for how it went for her and that she didn't let things go back to normal so quickly. And I feel the same way. I'm grateful for the 500 consecutive bedtimes, my boys, I'm grateful for the road trips we took. I'm grateful for the projects that we worked on, like Daily Stoic as a podcast, as a YouTube channel, the bookstore, that I wrote the boy who would be king and the girl who would be free night after night

telling bedtime stories to my kids that I wouldn't have had the time or the space creatively to do had I not had nothing to do. I'm grateful for the things that forced me to notice the work that I had to do on my marriage. I'm grateful for what it taught me about human nature about history history, about adversity, about mortality, about morality, about our obligations for each other. I'm really grateful that it didn't radicalize me, that it didn't turn me into a cruel and unfeeling person.

Like, it's interesting that I, you know, I didn't really notice that Meditations was a plague book, that Marcus Surrelus wrote it during a plague. When Marcus talks about how the real pestilence is the plague that destroys your character. And I saw that happen to people I know, to people I cared about. I'm grateful that it showed me

what I needed to be grateful for, my health, my family, the present moment. I'm grateful that it taught me how easy it can be to take things for granted in your life, things that other people don't share and that would count themselves very lucky to have. I think we can say that COVID and the lockdowns and the social distancing argue about them however much you want. Whether they should have happened or shouldn't have happened. But what you can't say is that it wasn't a radical lifestyle experiment. One of the most radical lifestyle experiments in human history. And I'm glad that I learned something from that experiment. I'm glad

that I got better because of that experiment. In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote this note card to myself. I said, 2020 is a test. Will it make you a better person or a worse person? I'm grateful that in the midst of the pandemic, I had an opportunity to be of service, not just writing this email and hearing from all these people who are checking in with it every day and watching our stuff. But like we use the Daily Stoke platform early on to raise money for first responders and to buy PPE. You know, we used it to sort of disseminate information that was important. I got to focus on helping people not become radicalized and lose their mind and be infected as Marcus Ruiz was talking about. I'm grateful for the opportunity later on to volunteer.

Both my wife and I worked at a bunch of different vaccine clinics out here in Bastrop County. Like I'm grateful for how it changed my understanding of what you're supposed to do when the world is falling apart, when things aren't working, when people need help. Like what it means to be a neighbor, what it means, what that sort of stoic virtue of justice

is actually about. That test, like did this thing make you better or worse? That's what I tried to think about over and over again. And it's what I tried to think about now. Stockdale in the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam would talk about that experience as he said it was the defining experience of his life which in retrospect he would not trade. He was saying he wouldn't trade it not because it was fun, not because it didn't

wreck him physically and it didn't take something from him, but that he took something from it also, that he learned something, that he was changed by it, that he grew because of it, that he stepped up and he met it, that it informed and shaped him for the better. And that's what it means to say that the obstacle is the way. That's what Marcus Aurelius is saying. Not that you would choose it, not that it should have happened,

not that it needed to happen, but it did happen. And in it, while you're in it and after, how did you grow, change change and become improved by it? Every day I send out one Stoic inspired email, totally for free, almost a million people all over the world. If you wanna take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe.

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