What Can You Notice?

There is beauty and peace in noticing. The world is filled with things to see and hear.📚 Books Mentioned: Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton👉 SPECIAL OFFER | Go to dailystoic.com/spring and enter code DSPOD20 at checkout to get 20% off the Spring Forward Challenge! Challenge yourself to spring forward and become the person you aspire to be. The Spring Forward Challenge starts March 20, 2026.🎥 VIDEO EPISODES | Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues—courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom—into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  What can you notice? For years, the seasons passed Chloe Dalton by in a blur, like they do for most of us—travel, deadlines, work, the constant churn of ambition and obligation. Then, during the pandemic, trapped in an old house in the English countryside, on a walk one day, she comes across a leveret—that's a baby wild hare, and she nurses it back to life. What ensues is a surreal and moving friendship as the hare becomes a free-range companion, hopping around the house, snoozing quietly by Dalton's side as she writes, running in from the fields when called, drumming softly on her duvet cover to get her attention, even giving birth and raising babies inside Dalton's home.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  Spending hundreds of lonely, quiet hours with this leveret—which she never names, she learned to understand its habits and its needs, seeing the world from someone else's point of view. "I found a new spirit of attentiveness to nature," Dalton writes in her lovely book, Raising Hare. "No less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal. For as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me." For many years, the seasons had largely passed by. My perceptions of the steady cycle of nature disrupted by travel and urban life. "I had observed nature in broad brushstrokes," she writes, "in primary colors at a surface level. I had been most interested in whether it was dry enough to walk

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  or warm enough to eat outside with friends. I could identify only a handful of birds and treats by name. I hadn't observed the buds unfurling, the seasonal passage of birds, the unshakable rituals and rhythms of life in a single field or wood. I now marvelled at the purple tinge on the back feathers of the house martin, the smallest creature I had ever seen, which flew into the house one morning, observing the gleam of sun on the mirror finish of its plumage, before releasing it into the air." It's a passage reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius noticing the way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven, or how ripe figs begin to burst. And olives on the point of falling, the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  Stocks of wheat bending under their own weight, the furrowed brow of the lion, flecks of foam on the boar's mouth. There is beauty and peace in noticing the small, daily transformations, the subtle shifts of life through the windows, the cracks on the sidewalk, the sounds of the birds. The world is filled with things to see and hear. Are you noticing them? Are you cultivating the stillness that allows you to appreciate them? Obviously, that's the idea of Stillness is the Key. I also love Dalton's book, Raising Hair, which, if it had come out while I was writing Stillness, it would be in the book for sure. You can grab both of those at The Painted Porch, or I will sign your copy of Stillness is the Key.

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  You can grab that at store.dailystoic.com.