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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.
It's a bad use of your creativity. It'd be impressive if it wasn't so painful. The way we're able to imagine all the terrible things that might happen, the vivid scenarios we concoct in our head, the extensive conversations we practice, the arguments we get into with people we've never met. Seneca talked about how our imaginations are almost more powerful than reality. Real enough that they may well cause us more suffering than actual life.
In a recent interview, the singer Jewel talked about realizing that this catastrophizing in her head, this anxiety and fear, what it really was was a bad use of creativity. She was using her considerable imagination and artistic skill not to make art, but to torture herself. We all do this. Instead of using our mind to solve problems, we set it to work on problems that don't exist. Instead of using it to move forward, we use it to look backward.
pouring over what already happened. Instead of using it to feel good, we use it to torture ourselves. And how crazy is that? And how counterproductive. You have been given an incredibly powerful tool, this brain and imagination of yours. But like a gun or a knife, it can just as easily harm the user as it can protect or serve them. We have to train and discipline ourselves. We have to direct these resources properly. We have to channel our creativity, not into fear and anxiety, but into purpose and progress.
I actually have on my desk here this is the anxiety fidget or coin that we made over at Daily Stoke. I'm someone who does that. I just I'll realize I just spent a whole bunch of time having a conversation in my head that doesn't exist for no reason of no purpose. It only tortured myself. The other person isn't thinking about this at all.
It was a bad use of my creativity. As Seneca said, he who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary. I tried to apply that creativity that I would ordinarily spend being anxious into making something that can help me with my anxiety. And we've sold a bunch of these people who've really liked it. I think you'll like it too. I'll link to it in today's show notes. It's awesome. It's got this hole in the middle. I kind of like to spin it between my thumb and my index finger.
It's awesome. Check it out. I'll link to that in today's show notes, but mostly try to use your anxiety. Try to use your creativity for good and not for bad to move forward and not backward.
Practice letting go. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoke Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours, truly. And my colleague, Stephen Hanselman, who I also wrote the Daily Stoke with, you can actually get signed copies of the Daily Stoke Journal in the Daily Stoke store at store.dailystoke.com. Or we've got copies here at the Painted Porch, my bookstore in Vastrop, Texas. Always powerful. People ask me to sign them all the time. Anyways,
Check out the Daily Stoke Journal. I'm on my fourth year of doing it. You might like it as well. We suffer when we lose things we love, and we suffer most when we lose people we love. But it is a natural, unavoidable part of life. And the Stoics say that this suffering is increased by our belief that we possess the objects of our love. They are, as we like to say, a part of us.
This belief doesn't increase our love or care for them, but rather is a form of clinging that ignores the simple fact that we don't control what will happen, not to our own bodies, let alone to the ones we love. Epictetus taught a powerful exercise that every time you wish a dear child, their family member, or friend good night,
You remember that these things are like a precious breakable glass. Remember how dramatically things can change while you sleep. Marcus too struggled to practice this with his own family as he tucked them in at night. And the point wasn't to be morbid but to recreate a sense of appreciation and a kind of humility.
You cannot take anyone, especially someone you love for granted. And then the quotes are from Epictetus in Seneca. Epictetus says, whenever you experience the pangs of losing something, don't treat it like a part of yourself, but as a breakable glass so that when it falls, you will remember that and won't be troubled.
So, too, whenever you kiss your child, sibling or friend, don't layer on top of the experience all the things you might wish, but hold them back and stop them, just as those who ride behind triumphant generals remind them that they are mortal. The same way, remind yourself that your precious one isn't one of your possessions, but something given for now, not forever. That's Epictetus' Discourses 3.24. But the wise person can lose nothing.
Such a person as everything stored up for themselves leaving nothing to fortune. Their own goods are held firm bound in virtue which requires nothing from chance and therefore can't be either increased or diminished Seneca on the firmness of the wise.
We did a daily stoch email recently that I wanted to read you or a chunk of it. Let me pull it up here. There's actually a poem. You wouldn't think of Margaret Atwood, the author of Handmaid's Tale and many other things as a poet, but she has this beautiful poem called The Moment. And I think it captures what the stochs are talking about here and I'll read it because it's only three verses.
The moment when after many years of hard work and a long voyage, you stand in the center of your room, house, half acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and you say, I own this. In the same moment, the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse. The air moves back from you like a wave, and you can't breathe. Know they whisper, you own nothing.
You were a visitor time after time, climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming, we never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way around. I just think that's such a beautiful poem. And look, when there's a part of what Seneca here that stops me, he says, so that when the glass falls, you will remember that and won't be troubled.
Now, I don't think that's quite right. We know that Seneca lost a child and grieved quite deeply. We know that his mother grieved him quite deeply when he was exiled and he, in turn, grieved his mother. We know that he and his wife struggled at their parting when they were forced to commit suicide. The idea that the stoic can just think these things and then not be attached to people
I think that's a false ideal, and I don't think that's where you actually want to get, even if you could get there. To me, what Epictetus is exercised, what Marcus is doing, and it's when I practiced almost every day during the pandemic, when, especially in those dark early days when it seemed very, very serious, not that it wasn't serious, but it seemed so much more uncertain the seriousness of it.
The idea of holding your children close and saying that you don't know what's going to happen through the night is there to make you breathe that moment in, to not rush through it, to not try to get it over with, right? So you can go check your email or watch Netflix or have a snack, right? It's to go, no, this is important. I'm not going to rush through this. I'm not going to get past it.
I am going to breathe it in because it matters, because it's here now. To me that this is a breakable glass doesn't mean put it up on the highest shelf, wrap it in bubble wrap and hope nothing bad ever happens to it. It's to appreciate it while you have it.
to realize that you don't have it forever because none of us do. That's what I take from that exercise. And you know, that was brought home to me even more during a year, almost a year exactly from, you know, March of 2020 when this freak storm hits Texas and I, you know, everyone tuck their kid in at night. They lost power.
And a few families woke up and found that their children or older family members had died and their sleep had frozen to death and their sleep. I had gotten so cold, so unexpectedly. You just think about how tragic that is and how that could happen to anyone. And you realize,
how much worse it would feel if you'd had an argument before a bed, if you'd been short before a bed, if you'd said no, I said only two books and now you want me to read a third one, right? You would regret that.
It would be tragic in any circumstance. Again, the idea that you would get to a place where you would not care that it happened. I don't think that's right. Marcus Aurelius loses multiple children. That's insane, unthinkable. And even in meditations, you get the sense that he's still grieving, still working through it. So you don't get there. But you do hopefully get to a place where you can minimize the regrets. So you're not sitting there kicking yourself saying, I wish I'd been more patient.
I wish I'd been there more period. I wish I hadn't rushed through things. While I had them, I really loved them. I really connected with them. I wasn't detached from them. I was attached to them. And that's why this tragedy is the least bad version of how it could go. That's not the happiest way to leave you today, but I do think it's a powerful exercise and worth thinking about. And I'll talk to you soon.
Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stog Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years. We've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.
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