You Can’t Carry It With You if You Want to Survive

"Things happened. Bad things. Things you never wanted, that hang over you wherever you go. We close our eyes and we see them. We worry that they’re going to happen again; we worry that we were to blame, that it was our fault."How does a Stoic deal with all this baggage? Ryan explains on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***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 @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  "You can't carry it with you if you want to survive." Things happened, bad things, things you never wanted but hang over you wherever you go. We close our eyes and we see them. We worry that they're going to happen again. We worry that we were to blame, that it was our fault. Not that you're special in this regard. We all have baggage, regrets, pains that plague us. If we want happiness, if we want to live, though, we have to learn how to let this go, how to forget. "Let the past bury its dead," Wadsworth wrote. "Act, act in the living present," and Florence and the Machine sang, "You can't carry it with you if you wish to survive." Marcus really spoke of cutting free of the impressions that cling to the mind, freeing

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  ourselves of both the future as well as the past, so that we could rejoice in the perfect stillness of the present moment. How wonderful that feeling is, how deserving of it we are. So much of what we're carrying is nothing, nothing that we've carried for a long time, and how much better we would be if we could let it go. This moment is in front of you. This day is just beginning, and it's a fresh one. It doesn't know what happened or what caused it. It is a blank canvas. How will you use it? If you like the podcast that we do here, and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.