We Can't Just Do This. (Or Can We?) | The Real Power You Have

"Sometimes it can feel—especially lately—that we are, to use the novelist James Salter’s haunting phrase, just burning the days. We get up. We answer emails. We work. We eat. We sleep. One day bleeds into the next. What day is it again? The weekend? Already?"Learn how to break through that feeling in today's Daily Stoic Podcast. Also learn more about today's weekly meditation, which exhorts you to find the true, lasting sources of power that you have.***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 Daily Stoic: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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  We can't just do this, or can we? Sometimes it can feel, especially lately, that we are, to use the novelist James Salter's haunting friends, just burning the days. We get up, we answer emails, we work, we eat, we sleep. One day bleeds into the next. What day is it again? The weekend already? There's no question that some people were going through their lives like this long before the pandemic radically shrunk our existences. They were just killing time even as time was killing them. They were proving Seneca's warning that life isn't short. We just waste a lot of it. But is there perhaps another way to look at that burning the days expression? Because wood is burned to create heat,

• 1:16Speaker 00

  gasoline can fuel an engine. As much as time has blurred together for some of us, it's also slowed down. Don't you feel like you've been really living lately, even though you're doing less? You're more focused, you're more rooted. You know what matters. For some people, the last few months have been burned away. For others, they've been used as fuel. Some of us have been bored. Others have been more productive and creative than ever before. Time can blur together because we're wasting it or because we're so locked in, we don't even notice its passage. One of those is shameful, the other is living. And what has it been for you? That's the question. If you don't like the answer, remember, it's not too late to change.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  There is fleeting power and there is real power. Fleeting power can be taken away while real power is in our minds and our bones. The former tends to be along the lines of wealth, fame, a high position, and the leverage all those things give us over other people. But the Stoics thought that this kind of power was inferior to the real power that each person possesses, the power of our minds to reason and to make judgments and choices based on the real worth of things. You can have both kinds of power too, but only if you keep the first kind of power subject to the kind of power that the Stoics cared about. So some quotes to leave you with. "This is the very thing which makes up the virtue of a happy person in a well-flowing life,

• 2:43Speaker 00

  when the affairs of life are in every way tuned to the harmony between the individual divine spirit and the will of the director of the universe." That's from Chrysippus. "Don't trust in your reputation, money, or position, but in the strength that is yours, namely your judgment about the things you don't control and the things you do control. For this alone is what makes us free and unfettered, that picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and the powerful." That's Epictetus from the Discourses. "Understand at last that you have something in you more powerful in design, more powerful and divine than what causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mere puppet. What thoughts now occupy my mind?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Is it not fear, suspicion, desire, or something like that?" It's Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12:19. I think what the Stoics are saying is that, on the one hand, we're fragile powerless creatures, right? We are at the mercy of fate. We're at the mercy of a higher power, if you believe in that. We're at the mercy of good luck, bad luck. We don't control any of that. But what we control always is our thoughts, our reactions, our opinions. So we have this extreme powerlessness on one hand, right, the powerlessness as a fragile, puny human, subject to tyrants, subject to the weather, subject to airline delays. On the other hand, we have the power to decide what this means, right? We're the...

• 4:08Speaker 00

  The omniscient narrator, author of our lives in the sense that we decide how we're going to integrate this. If you think of of James Stockdale, he's saying, look, on the one hand, I'd accept unflinchingly the reality of the situation I was in. But I, but he says, I never surrendered my belief that I controlled the end of the story. That's the real power that we're talking about, the power to see things as they are, to value the right things, to integrate it into our lives, to to choose to integrate it into the well flowing life, to use Chrysippus's phrase. So the Stoics are saying, don't trust the fact that you're currently beloved. Don't trust the fact that you're currently hated. Don't trust that you're rich or powerful. These are not the real power that you have.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  The real power you have is your opinion, your judgments, the standards you hold yourself to, that your ability to see through all that superficial stuff. That's the power. Our mind is the power and and our mind is much more powerful than our body. Right? They can throw your body in jail this week. Right? You can get, your body can get fired from your job this week. Right? Lots of stuff like that can happen. But nobody can force you to change what you think about this. No one can force you to despair. No one can force you to give up. No one can force you to quit. No one can force you to believe that you're, you know, you're a piece of crap. No one, no, you have that power and that's a power that can only be relinquished.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Or or obviously taken from you in death. But at that point, it's over. Right? So the point is this power we have, this superpower, that the power to determine events, to shape things, to integrate them into our lives. That's a power we always have, but yet so many of us relinquish it. For this alone, Epictetus is saying, is what makes us free and unfettered. He's saying that as a person who was literally a slave. He's saying, this is what makes us free and unfettered. It picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and the powerful. And I think that's such a powerful thing from Epictetus. He was realizing that in Nero's court, even though he was a slave, because he retained this power, he was actually freer.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  By being in control of himself, he was freer than many of the rich, powerful people in Nero's court. I would say he was freer than Seneca, right? Seneca was a slave to the money and the fame and ultimately Nero's command. And Epictetus, sure, he had his leg broken by his slave master, but he was freer than all of them. And so I wish you that kind of freedom this week. Think about that. Worship this power you have. Don't relinquish it. Don't let it go easily. Use it and have a great week. We did create at the beginning of the pandemic, this Alive Time Challenge. The idea being that although our lives are more circumscribed, and that's an obstacle, there are certain opportunities presented inside that obstacle. Thousands and thousands of people have gone

• 7:02Speaker 00

  through it now. We've donated tens of thousands of dollars to food banks as part of the challenge. I think we're knocking on the door of 100,000 meals served because of it. We'd really like to have you take it with us. You can go to dailystoic.com/alive time. Or of course, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at dailystokelife.com, you get this challenge and all the other ones for free.