Give Yourself This Gift

There is a beautiful passage on the last page of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, The Little House in the Big Woods. She writes of an evening in the cabin with her family, her father playing the fiddle, her mom knitting in a rocking chair:“She thought to herself, ‘This is now.’ She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  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, dailystoic.com.

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  Now is now. There is a beautiful passage on the last page of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "The Little House in the Big Woods." She writes of an evening in the cabin with her family, her father playing the fiddle, her mom knitting in a rocking chair. It says, "She thought to herself, 'This is now.' She was glad that the cozy house and ma and pa and the firelight and the music were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now, can never be a long time ago." It's a passage that has resonated with millions of people over the last 86 years, including the writer Gretchen Rubin, who ends her book Happier at Home with a meditation on

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  how it has inspired her for most of her life. What does it mean? It means the same thing that the Stoics have always talked about, that you have to live in the very now, even when it is ordinary and quiet, because the now is very special. "Give yourself a gift," Marcus Aurelius wrote, "the present moment." But too many of us reject that gift. We think of long ago, we dream of or fear a distant future, we are distracted and preoccupied and miss what is happening around us. It's the quiet evenings at home with family that we should be present for. It's the ordinary present that we should cherish, because it's all we have.

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