Daily Stoic Sundays: Find Contentment Where You Are NOW With Stoicism and Stillness

In today's Daily Stoic Sunday episode, Ryan talks about how the pursuit of stillness and inner calm can be found, how he finds it in his own life, and what it allows him—and you—to do. Get Stillness Is the Key: https://geni.us/dr4yGThis episode is brought to you by the Theragun. The new Gen 4 Theragun is perfect for easing muscle aches and tightness, helping you recover from physical exertion, long periods of sitting down, and more—and its new motor makes it as quiet as an electric toothbrush. Try the Theragun risk-free for 30 days, starting at just $199***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.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Speaker 00

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan. In October of 2019, I went on tour. I left the last week of September, and I basically did not get home until early November. I saw my family a few times as we were able to meet up, but it was something like 25 or 30 different talks in like 20 different cities over a very short amount of time. It was exhausting, exciting, exhilarating, cool, gratifying, all at the same time. Obviously, this was part of the launch of Stillness is the Key, which ended up debuting at number one on the New York Times list,

• 1:38Speaker 00

  which was wonderful and exciting and validating, but, you know, obviously didn't compensate, obviously in the moment, didn't mitigate the bone-ass tiredness that I felt. And while I was on tour, I ended up doing a small swing through the Pacific Northwest. I did Vancouver, Seattle, Portland in three days. And when I was in Vancouver, I spoke to a thing called EO, which is Entrepreneurs Organization. And I was mostly talking- About ego, but I sort of closed the talk with a story I now tell in lots of my talks. It tends to be popular with people, but it's a story about what it means to build stillness

• 2:20Speaker 00

  into your day and how I've found it, sort of living out on a farm in the countryside. You can watch a video of this part of the talk, but we thought we'd go over the audio of it. But basically, I just, I talk about sort of my routine and why the importance of building in stillness is so important and what it gets you. And I think at the end of the talk, we connect this back to this Stoic idea of memento mori. And I think, why are we so anxious? Why are we always doing, doing, doing? The anxiety of death is obviously a big, big part of that. So here's the talk. I hope you like it. I have, you know, very much enjoyed not being so busy since.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  And as I look towards this fall, the launch of my next book, this coronavirus pandemic has made, you know, the idea of doing it to her not just scary, but probably impossible. And so we'll, we'll see where things take us. So, you know, as, as frayed and as exhausted as I was, I was also trying to breathe it in, enjoy it, which is a big part of this idea of stillness too, because you never know, whatever it is that you're doing, as frustrating or exhausting, as exciting or as routine as it may be, when you'll get the opportunity to do it ever again.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  We can combat ego by seeking what I call stillness, by slowing things down, by getting some real perspective, by disconnecting from that egotistical world of Instagram and Twitter and social media, right? How can we find stillness that allows us to quiet that negative voice inside us? So I live on a little farm outside Austin, Texas. Every morning, first thing I do, I wake up early. I don't check my phone in the morning and I go for a long walk. I usually take my son and we're just outside and we're experiencing the vastness, but the ordinariness of nature. We're just fully present. We're just there. We're not focused on emails. We're not focused on tweets. We're just focused on being present. And sometimes in The mornings we go, we see my, my donkey. His name is Buddy.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  I bought him on Craigslist for a hundred dollars. He's a, he's a wonderfully sweet animal. But when we first got him, we would see him, he'd just stand there. He'd stand there for like hours on end. Sometimes he comes and visits us. He could open the back door to my house. But the, the, the point is, he would just stand there. And I remember when I first noticed this, I thought, what a dumb animal. Like, how long is he gonna stand there? What are you doing, right? And then I realized, like, he's doing his job. Like, this is his job. First off, donkeys are livestock guarding animals. So just like being around keeps away coyotes and foxes and, and mountain lions. But as a pet, his main job is just not to die, right? Like, if he doesn't die, he did his job. That's a pretty successful day, right? Not dying is success.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  He's not comparing himself to the other donkeys. He's not wondering if he's realizing his potential. He's not whipping himself for not being smart enough, for not being better than other people. He's just present, right? He's just there. He's just himself. And that's, we're not that different. As much as we'd like to be different, we're not, we're animals like all the other animals. We're here for a relatively short amount of time. There's no reason that we can't be still and present and, and content like that. So I wanna, I want, I, I try to seek out this example. I try to go and see it. I try to meditate on it. I try, try to remind myself that it's not that different for me. A therapist once said to me, she said, you know, Ryan, it's human being, not human doing, for a reason, right? And this is what I mean about that overwork stuff.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  We can be so needing to do, do, do, that, that we end up not being still. And we lose perspective and, and we lose appreciation for all the things that we have. And so there's another thing I like to do in Texas. There's a national park called Dinosaur National Monument. And you can walk out in this river and you could stand in a footprint left by a dinosaur 110 million years ago. Is this Texas? So there's a creationist museum across the street that disputes that the footprint is 110 million years old. But it is. And what I, the reason I like to step in it, the reason I think it's such a transformative, moving, almost spiritual experience for me. Is like this dinosaur left a far greater mark on the planet than like any person in

• 6:35Speaker 00

  this room, than Alexander the Great, than any conqueror, whatever. A hundred and ten million years from now, they will be dust and this will probably still be here, right? And it's a reminder that like, first off, it doesn't mean anything to this dinosaur that the footprint's still there. But that the impact, the legacy that we're thinking too much about, that we think is a sort of a monument to our greatness, is really kind of an ephemeral, meaningless thing to chase. That what matters is what you do while you're alive. What matters is who you are as a person, to the people you care about, or the mission that you feel like you were put on this planet to do. I carry a coin in my pocket. It says memento mori. It's this ancient stoic and philosophical practice of constantly reminding ourselves

• 7:18Speaker 00

  of the shortness of life and the fact of our mortality is there not to be morbid, but to humble us, to sort of bring us back to the present moment. And on the back, it has a quote from Marcus Aurelius. He says, "You could leave life right now, but that determine what you do and say and think." If your time on this planet is very short, there's no room for ego, there's no room for the sort of petty politics or grudges that it holds. All that matters is that thing in front of you. All that matters are the people that you care about. All that matters is the character that you bring to things, the mindset that you bring to them, and doing them as if it's kind of the last thing that you are going to do on this planet, because it may well be that. Seneca, he says, "We should prepare our minds as if we've come to the end of life."

• 8:03Speaker 00

  He says, "Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time." So when I meditate on the mortality, when I go for this walk in the morning, that's what I'm thinking about. That's what's bringing me present. That's what's reminding me of what really matters, not these other things, not credit, not attention, not if I'm getting my way, but am I doing the things that matter? Am I doing them as if this is the last thing I'm going to do in my life? And so... That's why I think ego is so toxic. That's why we have to push it away. That's why we do this sweeping. That's why we do this work. That's why I'm here talking to you guys today. When I'm saying that ego is the enemy, when I'm talking about destroying ego, it's not about tearing you down or making you feel like you don't matter. You do matter.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  But if we can destroy that ego, if we can see it as the toxic force that it is, what that liberates us to do is the work that matters, that we are put here to do. And hopefully, we can sustain it once we have it. So, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Thanks.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Please check out the Daily Stoic Stoic, where we sell products that we ourselves use that are designed to take these Stoic lessons to the next level. Just go to dailystoic.com/store.