Keep Returning Home

“You’ve experienced it. Maybe it was after your first semester away at college. Maybe it was after a long trip or a year-long tour of duty. Maybe it’s every time you return to your childhood home for the holidays.”Ryan explains how nature and life revolve around constant change. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee 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?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom, designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday 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.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Keep returning home. You've experienced it. Maybe it was after your first semester away at college. Maybe it was after a long trip or a year-long tour of duty. Maybe it's every time you return to your childhood home for the holidays. Whatever the cause of absence and wherever the return, we've all experienced the truth in the line from the David Fincher movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. "It's a funny thing about coming home," he says. "Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You realize what's changed is you." That's the thing about life. Even as things seemingly stay the same, everything is always changing. Marcus Aurelius speaks beautifully of life as a river's unending flow. Borrowing from Heraclitus,

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  the Stoics knew that "no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man." All is change, including us. You have changed as you've listened to this, even as a few seconds ticked by. Every experience, everything you read or watch, every conversation you take part in, indeed, every minute that passes, changes you. And yet, for all this change, we must continuously return to the timeless principles that remain the same, like those famous Stoic practitioners who invariably studied Stoicism until their final breaths. Towards the end of his life, for example, Marcus Aurelius was still reminding himself, "Keep returning to it." That's why we read and reread Meditations, Letters of a Stoic, and Discourses.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  That's why you are in year two, or three, or four, or five of reading The Daily Stoic and listening to this podcast. Though the books, the figures, the lessons never change, you always do. And in this way, you are stepping into this familiar river of wisdom anew.

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. So check it out, DailyStoic.com/email.