Enjoy It While You Have It, Don’t Miss It When You Don’t | Washing Away the Dust of Life

“The thing about most things we label as “bad” is that they aren’t. They just are. A virus isn’t evil. An economic depression isn’t malicious. They are unfeeling, indifferent, inhuman events. Their impact on humans, unfortunately, is not quite so neutral, but the fact remains: They are things that just are.”Ryan explains how a Stoic views external events, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life is a 14 day course designed to teach you what you do not yet know. It includes 14 custom emails delivered daily (over 20,000 words of all-new content, 5 live video sessions with bestselling author Ryan Holiday, printable 14 Day Calendar With custom daily illustrations to track progress, a group Slack channel for accountability and community sharing, and more! Sign ups are open now but close on Sunday, May 2 at 11:59 PM CST. The course will begin on May 3. Sign up now at dailystoic.com/101This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. It tastes great and gets you the nutrients you need, whether you're working on the go, fueling an active lifestyle, or just maintaining your good health. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a otro episodio del Podcast Daily Stoic. El jueves hacemos doble trabajo, no solo leyendo nuestra meditación diaria, sino también leyendo un pasaje del libro "El Daily Stoic: 366 Meditaciones sobre la Wisdom, Perseverancia y la Art of Living", que escribí con mi maravillosa coautora y colaborador, Stephen Hanselman. Y así hoy os daremos una rápida meditación de uno de los estoicos, de Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, luego algunos análisis de mí. Y luego os enviamos al mundo para hacer lo mejor posible para convertir estas palabras en obras.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  ¡Disfruta mientras lo tienes, no te lo pierdas cuando no lo tienes! ¿Sabías la fábula del perro sin cola? Es una de las mejores de Asop. En la historia, un perro escape de una trampa al masticar su cola. El perro lucha para llegar a los términos con su terrible pérdida, casi deseando estar muerto, sin su hermosa cola. Finalmente, trata de convencer a los otros perros que la vida es realmente mejor sin ella. "Eres menos probable de ser atrapado por un canguro o atrapado en una trampa", dijo, "y los cazadores no tendrían nada que cortar", y sigue y sigue. Pero un perro artesano vio la trampa, por lo que dijo: "Solo estás diciendo eso porque has perdido tu cola. Si eso sucediera con nosotros, seríamos sabios para hacer lo mismo.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  Pero mientras tanto, vamos a disfrutar de lo que tenemos". Asop vivió muchos, muchos años atrás, y es posible que la moral de su fábula le dio su camino a los estoicos. Y ciertamente parece que lo hizo, porque mientras el mensaje principal de la historia es sobre ser cuidadoso con quien escuchas, llegar a los términos con la pérdida también es una gran parte de ello. Seneca, en su Nueva carta a Lucilius, habla bastante elegante sobre el tipo de auto-suficiencia que un estoico debe cultivar. "Si pierde una mano a través de enfermedad o guerra", escribe Seneca del filósofo, "o si algún accidente le pone una o ambos ojos, estará satisfecho con lo que queda, tomando tanto placer en su cuerpo impalecido y maimado como tomó cuando...

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Was sound. This is partly what the fox and some of the cynics missed. It's not that your tail, or money, or an impressive title are to be scorned. They should be enjoyed while you have them. It's that we have to understand that possessing is a fleeting thing, that it can all disappear in an instant. We can prefer to have things while we have them, but the second we lose them, we just move on. We don't need to fault others whose good fortune remains. We don't need to exaggerate or delude ourselves about our loss. We just adjust. We accept the new normal. We move on, because it's all we can do.

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  Washing away the dust of life. Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 747. "It's almost impossible to stare up at the stars and not feel something." As the cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson has explained, "The cosmos fills us with complicated emotions. On the one hand, we feel an infinitesimal smallness in comparison to the vast universe; on the other, an extreme connectedness to this larger whole."

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, given that we're in our own bodies every day, it's tempting to think that this is the most important thing in the world. But we counteract our bias by looking at nature, at things much bigger than us. A line from Seneca, which has since become a proverb, expresses Marcus's insight well. "The world itself is a huge temple of all the gods. Looking at the beautiful expanse of the sky is an antidote to the nagging pettiness of earthly concerns, and it is good and sobering to lose yourself in this as often as you can." And this is from the April 29 entry of The Daily Stoic, which I hope you check out. I had a moment where this idea of washing off the dust of earthly life, meditating on something bigger and...

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  Older than yourself, it really hit me. I was in Budapest. I've told this story before, but I was in Budapest and I was, I went to this Turkish bathhouse that had been there since the 1600s. I was giving a talk and I snuck there to do this before my talk. And I'm sitting in this cavernous tile room, in this hot water bubbling up from miles beneath the earth. And from my reading, it struck me that Marcus Aurelius had sat not far from where I was sitting, at the Roman baths at Aquinum, and experienced the exact same feelings. We were both washing off the dust of earthly life, literally, but in that way, we were both

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  sort of running alongside the stars, both connected to something very distant, very old, very timeless, very, very human. And this goes to what Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about. When you consider the expanse of history in the sky, you feel both small and big, because it's huge compared to you, but then you're also a part of it, and that makes you big. And I think these experiences where we meditate on the immensity, where we seek out history, and we try to touch something that goes back further than ourselves, we try to root ourselves

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  in that tradition, that series of torches being passed from one person to another, is humbling and inspiring and deeply important. And you just see it appear time and time again in the Stoic writings, and I think that's why it's important. In Ego is the Enemy, I quote this passage, I'm talking about John Muir in his first trip to Alaska, and he's exploring Glacier Bay, and he writes, "We feel the life in motion about us, the universal beauty, the tides marching back and forth with wirless industry, laving the beautiful shores, and swaying the purple dulce of the broad meadows of the sea where the fishes are fed, and the wild streams enrode white..."

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  With waterfalls ever in bloom and ever in song, spreading their branches over a thousand mountains. The vast forest is feeding on the drenching sunbeams. Every cell in a whirl of enjoyment. Misty flocks of insects stirring all the air. The wild sheep and the goats on the grassy ridges above the woods. The bears in the berry tangles, mink and beaver and otter, far back on many a river and lake. Indians and adventurers pursuing their lonely ways. Birds tending to their young everywhere, beauty and life, and glad rejoicing action. Pierre Hidot, one of the great translators of Marcus Aurelius and the writer of The Inner Citadel,

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  talks about the oceanic feeling, a sense of belonging to something larger, of realizing, as he says, "All human beings are an infinitesimal point in the immensity." And I think it's in those moments that we're not only free but drawn towards really important questions. Who am I? What am I doing? What is my role in the world? I hope you seek out some moments like that today. I hope you seek them out actively. It's a deep part of the Stoic philosophy. You deserve it, and you will be better for it.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Our newest course, Daily Stoics, Stoicism 101, Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life. You can sign up now, just go to dailystoic.com/101. You're going to be able to benefit from my synthesis of all this information over the years. This is going to be a live course. All the participants will join the course together and move through together at the same time. Registration is now officially open. It will close on Sunday, May 2, at 11:59 PM CST. And the course will begin on... This is different than our normal courses, but I'd really love to have you join us. Check it out, we think it's going to be one of our best. I hope to have you join me. Just go to dailystoic.com/101. That's dailystoic.com/101. Or just click the link in the show notes. And I'm excited to talk to you soon.