You Can Get Rid of It | The Present Is All We Possess

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:14Speaker 00

  It's a timeless problem, rich or poor, old or young, married or single, successful or struggling, modern or ancient. What people do is we accumulate stuff. We accumulate, accumulate, accumulate until our homes, our cars, our minds, and our schedules are cluttered. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius jokes about people whose abundance leaves their owner with no place to shit. And that's just the physical stuff. People also accumulate problems and grudges and anxieties and opinions, piles and piles and piles of them. Our mental load grows and grows. It builds slowly until we feel overwhelmed, stuck, and weighed down.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  And there is only one way out, ruthlessly decluttering. We have to eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. We have to get rid of stuff, get rid of our baggage, let go of beliefs, let go of worries, let go of people. We have to stop buying and stop saying yes. We must free ourselves from the weight of excess, shed what's unnecessary, and clear away what is holding us down.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Present is all we possess. And today's quote is Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2:14. So, pretty early in Meditations, but it's one of the great quotes from the book. He says, "Were you to live 3,000 years or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing. The longest and the shortest then amount to the same." For the present moment lasts the same for all and is all anyone possesses. No one can lose either the past or the future. For how can someone be deprived of what's not theirs?

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Today, notice how often you look for more. That is, wanting the past to be more than what it was, different, better, still here, et cetera. Or wanting the future to unfold exactly as you expect, with hardly a thought as to how that might affect other people. When you do this, you're neglecting the present moment. Talk about ungrateful. There's a saying attributed to Bill Keane, the cartoonist worth remembering. Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future. But today is a gift. That's why it's called the present. This present is in our possession, but it has an expiration date, a quickly approaching one. If you enjoy all of it, it will be enough.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  It can last a whole lifetime. I had two thoughts. I mean, obviously, I wrote the Daily Stoic, but I was thinking as sometimes when I read them out loud to you guys, I go, oh, I like that, maybe I'd tweet this, here's what I would add. I just had this experience going back through the obstacles away. And there's just little things that I've picked up since then that I would add like. And when I hear, I go, oh, maybe I'd add this or that. I put it down on the note cards. There's two little things, actually three. I'll give you two. The first two come from poems by William Blake. He says, "He who binds himself to a joy does the winged life destroy? He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity's sunrise."

• 3:51Speaker 00

  And then the other one is from a longer poem, "Auguries of Innocence," one of my favorites. But he says, "To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."

• 4:10Speaker 00

  It's this idea that, you know, the present is all that there is, but the present is so, so much. And then my favorite, I've talked about my love of the singer Bon Iver. I'm pulling this up so I don't mess it up because his lyrics are famously sort of enigmatic. But one of my favorite Bon Iver songs is Blood Bank. Actually, we played it at my wedding, I think, either when I walked down and then I waited for my wife. I think that's when we played it. Maybe I've been playing the whole intro, I forget, but I remember it's one of the songs we picked. But he says, "Then the snow started falling. We were stuck out in your car. You were rubbing both my hands,

• 4:53Speaker 00

  chewing on a candy bar. You said, 'Ain't this just like the present? To be showing up like this. As the moon went to crescent, we started to kiss.'" Anyways, I'm getting a little outside of stoicism here, I guess, getting pretty poetic. But what I like about both of those is they're just sort of showing the infinite, the mystery, the wonderfulness of the present, right? We skip over it because we want what's next. We're worried about what's next, and we don't want what's next. Or we're dwelling on the past, ruminating on the past, regretting the past. And what we're ignoring is the beauty and the wonderfulness

• 5:36Speaker 00

  and the mystery and the absurdity and the joy and the fun and the ordinariness of the moment that we're in right now. And when we slow down, when we embrace it, when we show up for it, when we're in it, we get that. I have a big chapter on being present in Stillness is the Key. I talk about Marina Abramovic and her presentation, The Artist is Present, where she just sat there and just was there, not doing anything, not working, not on her phone, not, she was just there for hours and hours and hours. And people came and sat in front of her.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  And it was overwhelming and emotional and transcendent. It was the kind of things that Blake was talking about and Bon Iver was talking about. It just, just was wonderful. And that's what the present is. Even when the world is falling apart, even when what we know is coming up next is not great. Think about what the year could hold for us, the direction things are going. But as I play with my kids, or I brush their hair, or I was just in the swimming pool and I was looking up at the stars. I go, man, this is wonderful. I'm just going to be here in this, at this moment, soak it in. That's what Seneca talks about.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  You know, let me give you this other quote. And I know I'm just quoting a bunch today, but it's one of my favorite quotes from Seneca. He says, snatch the pleasures your children bring. Let your children in turn find delight in you and drain joy to the dregs without delay. No promise has been given you for this night, he says. No, even that's too long. No promise has been given even for this hour, but this minute, the present you're in, however, whatever time span you're going to define the present, that has been given to you. You're in it right now. So actually be in it, be in all of it, be all the way in it. That's today's somewhat rambling message, and I'll leave you there.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.