Can You Imagine?

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  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, 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 DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Can you imagine? He was powerful, he was wise, he was important. He was not spared. In 147 AD, Marcus Aurelius welcomed the birth of his firstborn, a daughter named Domitia. He would bury her within a few short years. In 149, Marcus Aurelius and his wife had twin sons. They would both die in infancy. And sadly, this was the rule and not the exception for Marcus. He would end up burying the majority of his children. Can you imagine? The pain, the hammer blows of one tragedy after another. There's no way he didn't stagger under the weight of it all. His hair would have turned gray, his shoulders would have stooped, he would have stared off in the distance.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  He would have, as we know he did, broken down in tears at the mention of loss or memories. And nor would his story have been particularly unique in Rome. Infant mortality was high, life was unpredictable and cruel. But the world is not all that different today. We are all fighting our own battles. We are all besieged by misfortune in our own ways. Marcus Aurelius's story should inspire us not just to carry on, but to be sympathetic and patient with others. You have no idea what the person in front of you at the grocery store line is going through. The people you disagree with, whose views you don't understand? Imagine what tragedies and pain have shaped them. Imagine the weight of what they carry.

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  It's this perspective that binds us, that shows us that beneath all that power, wisdom, or status, or strangeness, or bafflingness, there remains a human being underneath, bearing unseen burdens and suffering, and that they, just like us, deserve a little compassion, a little grace, and a little understanding too.